Posted on 11/02/2006 5:23:50 AM PST by 8mmMauser
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.\
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) -- Following the lead of abortion advocacy groups, ABC News reporter Dan Harris wrote a news article Friday attacking the work of the thousands of pregnancy centers nationwide that provide abortion alternatives and help for pregnant women. The article also contained a false claim that induced abortion has no link to various confirmed risks.
In the headline of its story, ABC News claims that crisis pregnancy centers are "offering information long discredited by the medical community."
ABC News Makes False Claims on Abortion Risks, Pregnancy Centers
8mm
Here is a thread of PeterFinn pinged by FV on that heroine of the left, Sandra Day O'Connor, fearless in willingness to see innocents killed.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Cookies mailed to the U.S. Supreme Court last year contained enough rat poison to kill all nine justices, retired member Sandra Day O'Connor said at a conference last week.
O'Connor details half-baked attempt to kill Supreme Court
8mm
When you get right down to it, Harry Blackmun's conclusion that an unborn child was nothing more than an inconvenience for its mother and could therefore be butchered for any reason whatsoever has been responsible for more genocide than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot COMBINED.
GHWB would run a close second.
Greer is nearly blind. It takes extra courage for him to stomp puppies or girls to death. He might make a misstep and stub his toe or trip and fall down! You simply must hail his guts for torturing Terri to death. Not letting her take Holy Communion -- now, that might not be the popular thing to do but it was the RIGHT thing to do if you're going to dehydrate and starve a disabled woman to death. Terri could have stayed alive an extra day or two on bread and wine.
Terri Schiavo was an identifiable person suffering from an injury of suspicious origin. You liberals cried out from coast to coast cried out to put her to death. Not one of you argued that stem cells might cure her, did you?
Big deal, Bloomberg spurns a presidential bid. The voters would spurn him just as fast. He wouldn't have a chance. It's one thing to buy New York City, quite another to buy the whole country.
That's a strong opinion, Sandra. They're not all rats, are they?
This guy is from outer space. The conservative Republicans were scared witless by the polls. You could listen to it month after month. Not one cocky comment.
Good insight. Not to argue with FV, Bush 41 was far worse than O'Conner. He brought his Rockefeller Republican gang in with him and actively sabotaged the Reagan Revolution. We are paying for it now, big time.
Even if it weren't a health hazard, it would be evil. But of course this was a lie. You can't mess with the mother's complicated chemistry without creating risks. You have to tell lies to pretend evil isn't evil.
The risk of the baby dying through induced abortion is 100%.
He is the sole reason we had Clinton. The only good thing he did was Clarence Thomas.
Thanks. There is a particularly gruesome section of Hell reserved for Tiller.
I don't much care for Bill O'R, but he has been right on the money with this issue.
It's illegal to murder abortionists, but I don't see why they couldn't ask to be dehydrated / starved to death. The courts can order that their wishes be enforced. There is a recent precedent.
They may even wish to celebrate that which they extoll, their "right to die".
I would be exceptionally loath to ever vote for Jeb Bush for President (and certainly wouldn't do so in a primary), not because of moral outrage over Terri, but rather because he has demonstrated an inability to exercise "damn the torpedoes" leadership when the nead arises. Were Jeb Bush to become President, our enemies would almost certainly be aware of this weakness and able to exploit it.
I wish more people on Terri's side could have shifted some of the issues slightly, e.g. "A man who openly pledges to marry his live-in mistress upon his wife's death is no husband." Make abundantly clear that the Republicans weren't trying to come between a husband and wife, but rather to protect a wife from a vindictive ex who refused to give up the reins.
How about this subtle shift? "If a woman waits for a man to marry her as soon as he kills his wife she is no wife"
I don't think that one works. A wife has no duty of fidelity to the former or late wife her husband, so a lack of such fidelity hardly disqualifies a woman from being called "wife".
Nor would it in all cases be particularly improper for a married man to make plans to marry another woman as soon as he became eligible, if the man was separated from his wife for causes entirely predating and unrelated to the intended future marriage.
On the other hand, a man in the former situation should, by any reasonable standard, be deemed by his actions to have renounced all claims as spouse of the estranged wife. It is not reasonable for such a man to claim authority over his wife at the same time as he demonstrates that his interests lie with someone else.
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