Truth - Al Franken [61]
FRIST: Well, first of all, I never made a diagnosis. I think it’s very important that we saw the autopsy today. It does give us the definitive information that we did not have at that point in time. And that’s why I think it is big news that she had totally irreversible brain damage, and we now have that information. All we were arguing for on the floor of the Senate was to get an accurate diagnosis before you withdraw a feeding tube from a live person . . .
LAUER: . . . but when you stand on the floor and you said, “She does respond,” are you at all worried that you led some senators . . .
FRIST: No, I never said that. I never said she responded. I said—and I reviewed the court videotapes—the same ones the other doctors reviewed—and I questioned, “Is her diagnosis correct?”
It’s hard to see how someone so careful about his standing as a physician would forget making such an emotionally charged statement. It made me doubt the wisdom of his latest legislative initiative, S. 687, known as the FristCam Act, which would place a video camera in every one of America’s 4,226 intensive care units. The FristCams would pan the ICUs, and Frist would give each patient a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, depending on his assessment of their condition. According to Frist’s chief of staff, the Majority Leader would be able to make life-or-death medical decisions for tens of thousands of American families, even while signing correspondence or calling potential donors.
Let’s face it. The Schiavo case did not bring out the best in people. On the right, you had shameless abuse of medical “expertise” and flagrant exploitation of a family’s tragedy. On the left, it was even worse. Over in the culture of death, the “pull-the-tube people” were becoming increasingly “red-fanged and ravenous.” This according to Peggy Noonan, whose March 24 Wall Street Journal column was titled, “In Love with Death: the Bizarre Passion of the Pull-the-Tube People.”
Her argument was based on a fundamental, and almost certainly deliberate, misconception about the nature of the debate. For a vast majority of Americans, the real principle at stake in the Schiavo matter was whether Congress and the President should override the medical decisions of individual families. Because so many Americans had experienced similar tragedies in their own lives, they knew in their gut that this was painful enough as a private matter.
But for people protesting outside the clinic, it wasn’t about the appropriate limits of federal power. It was about whether to save a living, breathing, laughing, talking, thinking human being from judicially sanctioned murder. That gave the Peggy Noonans of the world an opening to attack Democrats.
“Why are they so committed to this woman’s death?” she asked. Peggy, let me answer your question with a question of my own. If in the middle of the whole thing, Terri’s husband, Michael, had said, “I may have remembered her wishes wrong—put the tube back in,” do you honestly think any of “the pull-the-tube people” would have screamed, “No! Kill her anyway! Kill her! Kill her!”? Is that what you think, Peggy?
It must have been what she thought, because otherwise there was no explanation for how she ended that column. By comparing us tube-yankers to Nazis.
When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.
Wow. She is awful, isn’t she?
Rush Limbaugh, always ready to give his political opponents the benefit of the doubt, had a more charitable explanation for why liberals wanted Terri Schiavo to die:
A question for those of you who are our friends on the left. Just answer honestly to yourself. How many of you want Terri Schiavo to die