Schiavo issue haunts Crist

St. Petersburg Times ^ | November 1, 2006 | ADAM C. SMITH

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Republican gubernatorial front-runner Charlie Crist says he was perfectly clear in opposing governmental intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.

He spoke out loudly.

And he was silent.

Loudly silent.

The day after limping through a tough nationally televised debate, the Republican attorney general wanted to talk about his plans to slash taxes. Instead reporters questioned him about his debate assertion that, “Yes, I did’’ speak out against Congress trying to force the reinsertion of the severely brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in 2005.

Crist did not publicly express his opposition to the Schiavo intervention until April 2006, more than a year after the Pinellas woman’s death. But he maintained on Tuesday that he forcefully expressed his opposition from the start.

“I spoke loudly,” Crist said in Tallahassee. “I think it’s important that when issues like that come up and you believe that government is the appropriate place for it that you act that out, and you walk the walk, and don’t just talk the talk.’’

The attorney general noted that his office “by not going to court and pushing the agenda on that issue, that was speaking out louder than anybody else did in Florida.”

This is one of many issues — from insurance reform to abortion and civil unions — where Crist has been accused of ambiguity or trying please all sides.

Contrary to his comments Tuesday, during the Republican gubernatorial primary in August he stressed to the weekly newspaper of the Florida Baptist Convention that his office helped the governor’s office with legal work to keep Schiavo alive, even though he personally had qualms.

“I don’t remember that, but I’ll check on it and see,” Crist said when asked about that interview with the Florida Baptist Witness.

Gov. Jeb Bush came to his would-be successor’s defense. “He spoke out to me,” Bush told reporters. Crist, however, said he never directly talked to Bush.

There are few issues in the political realm so black and white as the Terri Schiavo case. People either supported the state and federal government intervening to keep her alive or they didn’t.

But Crist is the second statewide candidate recently to face questions about how he acted during the Schiavo end-of-life controversies that erupted in 2003 in the Legislature and in 2005 in both the Legislature and Congress.

Democratic Attorney General candidate Walter “Skip” Campbell, a state senator from Broward County, has been on the defensive this week for having voted to keep Schiavo alive and later criticizing the governmental intervention. Crist’s involvement in the Schiavo case may be the only common ground between the Schindler family, Terri

Schiavo’s parents and siblings who fought to keep her alive, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, who insisted his wife did not want to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Both sides have criticized Crist.

“When he said in that debate that he’s going to be a leader, my heart dropped. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower,’’ Michael Schiavo said Tuesday. “If he really wanted to stand up he would have said, 'No, this is wrong. The government should stay out of this.’ ... Charlie Crist did not say a word, he was nowhere to be found. He’s a coward.’’

Terri Schiavo’s father, Bob Schindler, wrote an essay in August accusing Crist of snubbing the family’s pleas for him to help their efforts. “Florida Atty. Gen. Charlie Crist let my daughter die. He had it within his authority to save her life, but he turned a blind eye to her suffering,’’ Schindler wrote.

The Florida Democratic Party issued a release saying Crist “lied” about his role in the Schiavo case, but at a brief campaign stop at Arco-Iris restaurant in Tampa on Tuesday, Davis would only say that Crist “misrepresented his position.”

“I was up fighting George Bush and the entire United States Congress, both political parties, and Charlie Crist was unwilling to take a position,” Davis said.

Davis, trailing in polls and campaign money, is hoping his debate performance Monday night will cut Crist’s advantages. No statewide viewership numbers were available Tuesday, but in the Tampa Bay area about 152,000 households tuned in — a ratings jump for that time slot on WFLA — and that doesn’t include those who watched on MSNBC.

- Tallahassee bureau chief Steve Bousquet and staff writer Alex Leary contributed to this report. Adam C. Smith can be reached at asmith@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8241.\

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Yeah, to murder or not to murder? Tough call. Did Lizzie Borden's parents WANT to be slaughtered with an axe? The sad truth is, they did not have a Living Will, so we will never know their real end-of-life wishes.

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Lizzie just celebrated their right to die, maybe as a surprise gift.

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Judge not...

Ping to wagglebee thread on dems and judges...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Now that the elections have given them control of the Senate, leading Democrats on judicial issues have a message for President Bush. They don't want him to send up for confirmation any judges who would be hostile to legalized abortion or they plan vote down or filibuster them.

Democrats now have 51 votes in the Senate and will likely have a slim one vote majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Congress starts its new session in January.

Democrats Tell President Bush: Don't Propose Judges Against Abortion

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>> Committees are for hiding.

As in, "They deserve a good hiding." :-)

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>> Church of England says right to life for newborns not absolute

I thought it had been renamed "The Coven of England."

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>> Democrats Tell President Bush: Don't Propose Judges Against Abortion

God tells Democrats: Shut up.

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>> a move, polls showed, that was very unpopular with the public.

Only the rigged ones. Unfortunately, nearly all the polls were rigged by asking grossly inaccurate questions. (W/o too much exaggeration: "Do you think a brain-dead woman on life support should finally be allowed to go home to Jesus?") This was another avenue in which the media were complicit in Terri's murder.

One or two polls that stated the facts accurately had exactly the opposite result -- people were overwhelmingly OPPOSED to killing Terri. The liberals knew this, that is why they wouldn't ask straight questions in their polls.

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The libs in their gloating keep bringing up the "Terri Intervention" to try to show most Americans wanted to allow Mikey to kill her with no interference. Here is one example:

...Libertarians feel betrayed by big spenders, incompetent interventionists and moralizing busybodies. In the Schiavo case, in which 70 percent of voters thought Washington should have butted out, Republicans drove a wedge through their own ranks.

Out of the Gloom, A Silver Lining Bush must now admit that America is not Dittohead Nation.

And this is from Jonathan Alter or his other ego in Newsweak.

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Did I say "Terri Schiavo Intervention" would become a new buzzword? Yes, I did. But here is a modification appearing. It is also now interventionism.

A piece in the Harvard Crimson would instruct us on how "real" conservatives think and how we should all change.

3. Don’t succumb to a feud between libertarians who blame the midterm losses on social conservatives and social conservatives who feel overlooked and taken for granted. The episodes of blatant pandering to either side—e.g. Halliburton favoritism and Terri Schiavo interventionism—that were rightly condemned by liberals as well as by many conservatives were driven as much or more by a cynical leadership trying to buy support for upcoming elections as by the intended beneficiaries themselves. The Republican Party’s coalition of libertarians, social conservatives, and national defense voters is a winning one, and we will only suffer if we abandon it.

Looks to me like we are expected to set aside the atrocity of Terri's killing as it activated the greater wrong of the government stepping in to prevent the murder.

A GOP Recovery Plan

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Some more "if-onlys":

If we could only hold still so we can be redefined by "conservatives" who know better...

After all, our noticing that Adult Stem Cells, which really help are different than Embryonic Stem Cells which do no good, just cause tumors, is a view "unscientific" to certain elements who say the real truth lies in the vague blending of these opposites into one lump.

And we know global warming or cooling or whatever is a given, beyond dispute, beyond evidence or mere data.

By pursuing rhetoric and policies that targeted the religious right, Bush and Rove turned off many others, certainly including the well-educated, who reacted to their anti-science opposition to stem-cell research and global warming. The turning point, I believe, was a more emotional issue, that of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who brought Bush and his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to the barricades in 2005 to back legislation keeping her on life-support over the protests of her harassed husband. Autopsies showed the woman's brain was in a "vegetative state," and the cynical appeal to religious conservatives turned off huge numbers of voters. Polling at the time showed most Americans, of both parties, rejected the Bushes' campaign to "save" Schiavo, and were disgusted at the raw partisan appeal in a tragic case.

Now if we could just swallow some old bad tasting mantras...

The Republicans need more than a (right) wing and a prayer

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More scolding condescends from on high as our patronizers instruct us on how they know better.

It's painful to relive all the great failures that have led us to the point where we are now: the Schiavo affair, Bush's stem cell funding ban, the New Orleans catastrophe, and of course what has proven to be the overwhelming issue of this election and of the past several years: Iraq.

The Republicans Deserved to Lose

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What would Ted Bundy say?

Perhaps we are to believe that Reichert won the narrow victory over Burner because he foresook Terri. Perhaps this is why he squeaked by, not because he was the King Country Sheriff credited with bringing down the infamous Green River serial killer, (possibly the most brutal serial murder yet,) or because Burner was only lukewarm.

Reichert tried in his campaign to impress his swing-district voters with his political independence. As the UW's Jones observed, "He was able to distinguish himself from the Republicans on issues that mattered to that district" by voting for federal money for stem cell research, against Arctic oil drilling and against blocking the halting of life support for the terminally ill Terry Schiavo.

Reichert survived split tickets

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We are to hold still while our betters try to stuff us into a new box they have fabricated. Like schoolchildren, we are scolded again by our self-declared masters.

If a guy wants to kill his wife, it is his business. Who are we to think he should be slowed down? How dare we...

Besides, when Americans think of isms, they think -- at least they think first -- of how liberals and conservatives stand on social issues. A liberal backs abortion rights and gun regulations; a conservative wants to ban abortions and legalize all guns. By that measure, what has defined conservatism in the popular mind over the past couple of years has been its willingness to enlist government to block stem cell research, stop the teaching of evolution and supersede the duties of Terri Schiavo's husband.

Conservatives in Denial

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>> The libs in their gloating...

... are putting themselves on record. There may be a break in the case some day. For instance, what if George Felos, or Deathknell, or George Greer decided to tell all, in order to put their consciences at rest? What if Jodi's marriage came apart and she started talking? What if, God forbid, Michael should revert to form and beat her too? What if Michael himself confessed?

Finding that you, a supposed intellectual and pundit, got suckered by the likes of Michael Schiavo will not improve your intellectual reputation, Mr. Alter. You should have listened to your conscience and not to dishonest polls.

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It seems as if even the well-intentioned conservatives buy into the mantra pushed by the left and their pals, that the Terri Intervention meant it was bad to try to save Terri.

In our national politics, much, if not most of the noise, yelling, and fighting was coming from the Democrats, but the American people still remembered where the Republicans were wrong. They remembered the debacle over Terry Schiavo. They remembered the many scandals surrounding Abramoff. They saw Dennis Hastert stand up to the FBI when investigating a corrupt Democratic congressman, and they read about how the Republicans let a congressman prey upon the House pages with impunity.

After ‘change,’ who will lead the Republicans?

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Mike Pense, who could be Republican Minority Leader:

... I stood with my colleagues through the difficult issues, like the Terri Schiavo case and stem cell research and stood with the President as he vetoed legislation that would fund the destruction of human embryos for scientific research. But I also believe the role of Minority Leader to be willing to challenge the President of our own party respectfully but forcefully should this administration depart from our commitment to core principles.

Congressman Mike Pence talks with bloggers

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Jeb will continue? Will build on what he did for Terri?

Ok, Jeb proclaimed he wasn't going to run for President in 2008. So, let's get this one out of the way right up front: since when does a Party's "darling" who plays hard to get, eschew changing his mind, if DRAFTED to run. Therefore, Jeb will be the GOP's candidate with ONE very important caveat. The entire political landscape changes rendering Jeb ineligible (read: "UNelectable") if George W. is indicted and/or impeached. Like it or not, Jeb's reputation and chances hinge on his brother's escape from criminal and/or malefactorable notoriety. Naturally, at this pregnant moment in history, big brother's "OK" reputation is by NO MEANS safe. If Rumsfeld is indicted and charged ... George W. suddenly becomes "naked" to the same attack.

Snip...

So, let's look at Jeb's pluses and minuses. He's 53 years old and a converted Catholic. So, on which side of the ledger do we place any of this: of course, depending upon our OWN preferences, we'll select won't we? But, some of it is rather easy. Unlike his brother, Jeb was a fine scholar, having graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelors' degree in Latin American Studies in 1973 from The University of Texas at Austin. He registered for the draft, but the Vietnam War ended before his number came up. After earning his degree, Bush went to work in the international division of Texas Commerce Bank, which was a job he received through the influence of James A. Baker (yes, THAT James Baker). Jeb was transferred to Venezuelan capital, Caracas, to open a new operation for the bank. He spent two years there, attracting a lot of new business to that bank and gaining considerable respect for his business acumen. He moved his family there as well.

Snip...

Jeb Bush was also actively involved in the Terri Schiavo case (the brain damaged woman who had irreversible damage and who was on a feeding tube for over 15 years. Bush, who is pro-life, signed "Terri's Law," passed by the Florida legislature permitting the Governor to keep Schiavo alive. However, the law was judged unconstitutional by Florida's Supreme Court and when the decision was appealed to the federal courts, the U. S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

JEB Will RUN: BET ON IT

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The LAST THING this country needs is Jeb Bush running for president.

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Last night on House there was a Terry reference.

House said "this guy is no Terry Schaivo, he has a working brain"

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For the culture of death to successfully kill Terri, it was necessary to enlist the media to promote the idea that she was brain dead (even though there was video that showed her clearly responding to various things).

Walter Cronkite proved the media's ability to change public perception when he lied and claimed that America had lost the Tet Offensive. This was the same thing. They tell the lie and than attack whoever dares speak the truth.