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Posted on 05/24/2006 9:08:58 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Michael Schiavo has published a book titled "Terri: The Truth." It is about his well-known and, unfortunately, successful fight to end his wife’s life. Opening this book is like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole and ending up in a new and bizarre world.
You don’t even have to turn to the first page—just look at the front cover, where Michael proclaims, “My two babies were threatened with death. I was condemned by the president, the majority leaders of the House and Senate, the governor of Florida, the pope, and the right-wing media. . . . I didn’t respond to their attacks. I didn’t confront their lies. Until now.”
Well, a quick Internet search turns up page after page of Michael’s vigorous responses on Nightline, Larry King Live, and other venues, most of it very confrontational.
Why would he respond now? Books sales and talk shows are a lucrative business.
This turns out to be typical of the way things work in Michael Schiavo’s world. As readers of the book soon discover, Schiavo’s opponents deserve all the venom he can spew on them. To Michael Schiavo’s mind, nobody could possibly have a good reason for wanting to let Terri Schiavo live in her condition. So he paints his opponents as biased, liars, downright insane. Just as the book cover indicates, the pope, the president, the governor of Florida, Terri’s family, and several cranks who sent Michael death threats—which, by the way, I know from experience happens in these kinds of cases—are all lumped into the same category: people who opposed Michael’s noble crusade to kill his wife. Noble? Or was he after collecting the insurance money and marrying the woman he was living with? Michael Schiavo’s world, if you believe his book, is like the old Westerns where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys all wore black hats and twisted their mustaches a lot.
Joking aside, Michael Schiavo’s world is a dangerous and scary place, a place where the “survival of the fittest” is taken to a whole new level—a place where a badly brain-damaged woman should have her food and water taken away simply because she is badly brain damaged and her husband says she would not want to live that way. It’s a place where it’s easy for even a registered nurse like Michael Schiavo to confuse food, which everyone needs, with the kind of life support, like a respirator, which his wife did not need. It’s a place where, as Schiavo is accustomed to saying with a straight face, taking someone’s food away is not starving her to death; it’s simply allowing her to die peacefully and painlessly. (Why a hospice needs to administer morphine to a person dying painlessly is something that Schiavo does not bother to explain, like so many other issues.)
The scariest thing about Michael Schiavo’s world is that he, and so many of his partisans in the media and the public, do not want to give the benefit of the doubt to a comatose person. Now, I admit that many people today think well of Michael and less of those of us who defended Terri Schiavo since the autopsy showed that she had been brain-dead when she was in a comatose state. But that’s beside the point. Our concern was with safeguarding the process and giving her the benefit of the doubt. After all, you can’t do an autopsy until the person is dead, and then it is too late to correct mistakes.
Reading Schiavo’s book is a sobering reminder that we must never give up our fight to guard the rights of the weak and the voiceless, or one day we will all be living—and dying—in Michael Schiavo’s world.
This is part six in the “War on the Weak” series.
Funny, I don't remember the President or any of those other pols condemning Michael Schiavo. I remember them saying we needed to review this case carefully before killing a young woman. Of course, Mr. Schiavo has never been known for his solid adherence to the truth.
"Slippery slope? Try cliffdiving."--Freeper Crazieman comments on the post-Terri world.
There are links to further information at the source document.
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Chuck Colson BUMP!!
Someone who has done something criminal, obscene or disgusting, but wants you to focus not on what they did (leaking secrets, killing someone, going to jail) but on how they are a VICTIM.
Another case in point: The cover of Time/Newsweek with the Dixie Chicks: "They were called unpatriotic". Oh, poor babies--one or two evil rightwingers who they never cared for anyway calls them unpatriotic, and now they won't shut up about how they were called unpatriotic.
Did people used to praise accomplishment in this country, or did I dream all that?
I would have been nice if she had a drink of water-a sip-a drop on her lips.Bad week think the Holy Father the next day.
We know that Michael will get everything he deserves when he meets his Maker.
Michael is in my prayers,God bless our Terry and we hug her close for all of us who felt so helpless.
Just as the POS should have been. If he is a Registered Nurse, he should have his license revoked.
Agree 100%, though I'll say that Michael Schiavo makes the Dixie Chicks look like Mother Theresa.
Sure, I was only using them as another of this type--from the ridiculous to the frightening, you could say.
Noted...I wasn't objecting, just commenting.
"Now, I admit that many people today think well of Michael and less of those of us who defended Terri Schiavo since the autopsy showed that she had been brain-dead when she was in a comatose state"
Sigh. It's a good article but statements like this just kill me.
The autopsy never showed Terri was "brain dead". The examiner never made such a claim.
Brain death is a very non-subjective diagnosis achieved only after a patient has displayed specific symptoms (or non-symptoms).
A brain dead person requires a respirator. Terri did not.
If Terri had truly been brain dead there never would have been any controversy as the doctors would have had the legal right to remove the respirator (of which she didn't have) despite any wishes of the family.
Some claim the autopsy proved Terri was in pvs state.
This is not true either. PVS can only be diagnosed by a team of experts from different fields of medicine over a period of time. Even then...the experts cannot agree on how to specifically define what pvs is (or isn't). It is very subjective and there HAVE been people diagnosed with "irreversible pvs" who have come out of it (unlike brain death).
The autopsy did prove Terri's had shrunk and had atrophied.
The shrunken brain should be expected with a person who was dehydrated for nearly 2 weeks. Any of us would have a shrunken brain after such an ordeal.
Everyone already knew parts of her brain had atrophied.
There are many people who have atrophied brains...alzheimers patients, the elderly, stroke victims, brain damaged patients.
Brain atrophy does not "prove" pvs, nor should it be a basis for a death sentence unless we are all willing to perform CT scans on nursing home patients and dehydrate 95% of them.
I agree with your sentiments, but also agree with Colson--The important thing here was procedure more than her actual medical condition. If we are going to allow courts to give decade-old half-remembered conversations the same force as a written living will, we are all in very, very big trouble.
A country like this deserves (and in large part wants) Hillary Clinton or Al Gore as president.
Michael Schiavo is a textbook sociopath. Their outstanding quality is that they consider themselves the victims.
Last night was my last night of watching Law and Order. They ran a completely revisionist version of the Schindler-Schiavo tragedy, only (KAZAM!) the bad guys were transformed into the family who "persecuted" (and of course killed our fair hero just trying to end his wife's suffering), and the "pseudo religious" "pro-life nut" Christian leader. That's it: I am completely fed up with Christians ALWAYS being the bad guys on Law and Order, and "pro-life" meaning "evil killer" in their tvspeak. If it is not a gun nut, a pro-life nut, it is a pedophile priest or a hypocritical parent who kills their child in the name of God. I don't have to watch this daily assault on my values anymore.
Scotswife, I would urge you to send your comment to Chuck Colson at Breakpoint.
He may be a sociopath, but isn't it bizarre how the American people support HIM because "they wouldn't want to live like that." The American people are the problem.
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