Truth - Al Franken [60]
And let me just finish with this. This is exactly the issue that’s going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others. The point is, the other side has figured out how to win and defeat the conservative movement.
So, to Tom DeLay, the Schiavo case wasn’t so much about Terri Schiavo as about Tom DeLay. And he was determined to make the most of it. Where other Republicans confined themselves to vague generalities about the possibility that Terri was aware of her surroundings, DeLay felt no compunctions about making a case that was both laughably and tragically false on its face. The St. Petersburg Times, reporting on March 21 on DeLay’s leadership in the Schiavo matter, quoted his argument for reinserting the feeding tube:
She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts. It won’t take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo. It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require.
In other words, given proper treatment, there was no reason Terri Schiavo couldn’t live out her lifelong dream of being a Rockette.
Then again, DeLay wasn’t a doctor. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, on the other hand, was not just a doctor, he was a heart transplant surgeon of the first order. As the Senate’s only physician,3 he bore a special responsibility to choose his words carefully.
Frist took this responsibility seriously. Only a few months before, he had attacked his colleague, Senator John Edwards, for claiming that stem cell research could lead to cures for people like the just-deceased Christopher Reeve. In a conference call with reporters organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign, Frist had blasted Edwards’s claims as “crass,” “shameful,” “dishonest,” and “cruel.” “It’s giving false hope to people,” the doctor-senator charged, “and I can tell you as a physician who’s treated scores of thousands of patients that you don’t give them false hope.”
It was that kind of scrupulous regard for medical ethics that lent his words special weight when Frist took to the Senate floor on March 17 to discuss the Schiavo case. He didn’t want anyone to misunderstand how seriously he took this matter.
From my standpoint as a physician, I would be very careful before I would come to the floor and say this, that the facts upon which this case were based are inadequate. To be able to make a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state—which is not brain dead; it is not coma; it is a specific diagnosis and typically takes multiple examinations over a period of time because you are looking for responsiveness—I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond.
The video Frist was describing was drawn from hours and hours of footage that the Schindlers had edited together to highlight the moments when Terri’s random actions seemed to correspond with external stimuli. I’m sure the grief-stricken Schindlers believed their daughter really was responding. But of all people, Frist should have known that families sometimes have “false hope.”
In fairness, Frist was not giving Terri Schiavo false hope. She was in a persistent vegetative state. She was as incapable of false hope as she was of real hope. Or, for that matter, blinking on command.
Months later, Schiavo’s autopsy would confirm that her brain damage had been massive and totally irreversible. Rather than owning up to his senatorial malpractice, Frist committed the ultimate sin and lied to Matt Lauer in this amusing exchange on the June 16 Today Show :
LAUER: