Posted on 03/30/2005 8:45:00 AM PST by stan_sipple
the (relatively silent) majority of Americans feel(s) that the most compassionate treatment for Terri Schiavo - as well as the proper legal course of action - is to let her vegetative existence end, as advocated by her legal guardian, her husband.
For Republicans who consider their party a captive of the religious right on matters like medical research and right-to-die legislation and now legislative intrusion into the judicial system, there is a way to at least feel more comfortable with their political consciences.
That way is to leave a party whose leadership is currently attempting to leave behind in the dust of American constitutional history the principle of separation of powers that has served this country well for more than 200 years.
the religious conservatives deeply involved in the case believe in an afterlife - eternal life in circumstances considerably more appealing than lying in a hospital bed in a vegetative state for 15 years, being kept alive by food and liquids fed into your body through a hole in your abdomen.
Wouldn't the more compassionate course be to release Terri from a vegetative existence in the belief you are sending her on to a better life after death?
(Excerpt) Read more at omaha.com ...
With Ronald Reagan's candidacy in 1980, religious conservatives came in from the cold and threw their weight in numbers toward the Republican Party. They put their hope in men, and in politics, that perhaps through changes in the law or at the very least changes in the judiciary, our cultural slide could be reversed. Others on FR have said it more eloquently than I can, but the #1 issue among religious conservatives for 25 years has been a change in the judiciary. We have a conservative Pres who frankly has nominated outstanding people to the courts, and we have a 55 seat majority in the Senate. That majority has been thwarted by a 45 seat minority (44 plus Jeffords). The GOP can easily deliver on a 25-year promise to religious conservatives by effectively cancelling the minority's unconstitutional filibuster. The rumor now is that Frist won't even bring the nuclear option to a floor vote. If they fail to fight for the one thing religious conservatives have wanted (conservative judges), what's the point of continuing to support the GOP? Perhaps religious conservatives were foolish to place their hopes in men, and in politics in the first place.
Do you include ardent secularists in your broad swipe?
Bingo...none care about a person's rights.
Most of them like to get re-elected. Others like to well thought of by their friends. Schiavo has made this more than just a partisan battle that the Republicans can win. Now its rationality vs emotionality.
I never said I did. The person to whom you were responding said do it or stop bitching. I merely called you on attempting to misrepresent what had been said.
Why not address the actual post instead of misrepresenting what was said so you can whine about something else?
I know you don't mean Republicans. The ones who are almost exactly like Democrats.
The correct order of growing up intellectually is, infancy, awareness of politics, childish belief that government force is the answer to societal problems, becoming a liberal, becoming a Democrat, switching to the Republican party, and finally after seeing the futility of Democrat Lite, becoming a classic liberal. (libertarian)
You have your "teenage mentality" thing out of order. Anyone who thinks Republicans are the solution to the problems has a teenagers view of history, namely, less than twenty years.
Why not learn to read? Alternately, learn to mind your own business so you don't make an ass of yourself again.
I never whined nor bitched nor misrepresented.
"It would still come down to backing politicians (if they wanted to win) that were not perfectly in sync with the platform of the party. Really not any different than what you have now."
You are right, of course.
And Christian pro-lifers are not calculating political types. They are, rather, morally committed people who really believed that they were advancing the cause of life by backing the Republicans for thirty years in the wilderness. Last week, they watched the wheels fly off the car, as the Senate backed away from the nuclear option while the Executive and Legislative Republican leaders all played Pontius Pilate and intoned - falsely - "There is nothing more we can do" about a woman being tortured to to death by thirst.
I don't think the Christians have the temperament or the will to organize a pro-life party. Rather, I think they will simply wash their own hands of the evil and cowardice of the party they supported and stay home. I don't think they will be able to be wooed forth again for a generation either. And that means the end of the Republican majority.
There is STILL time for the Republicans to head off the disaster at the pass. The Nuclear Option can still be passed, and Terri Schiavo is still alive.
I see no signs that the Republican leaders are going to even attempt to pull the party out of the jam dive into which they have put it. What I see are leaders keeping their heads low "until it goes away".
What is going to go away is Terri Schiavo's life, and the Christian pro-lifers by the millions. And neither will be coming back.
"Then they'll be choosing to be a minority party again."
It appears they have already chosen that, but do not believe it.
The steps to the edge of the cliff and over it:
(1) Arlen Specter throws cold water on the pro-life movement the day after Election Day...and is elevated to the Senate Judiciary Chair anyway with the party's "Trust me".
(2) President, Governor, Congress and Republican legislature all clearly express the moral outrage at the evil being done by a (Republican) judge to Terry Schiavo. They posture, issue threats and subpoenas, but when the Judiciary digs in and asserts that it WILL kill the woman, the Republicans go silent, back down, wash their hands like Pontius Pilate, and say "We did everything we could do. Trust us. Blame the Judges."
(3) In the same week, several Republican Senators, including Presidential wannabee John McCain, say they will not support the so-called "Nuclear Option" to end the filibuster of judges. In other words, the "Trust me" chit given in (1), above, was repaid with a "F*** You" when the other shoe dropped.
The step over the cliff is now out of Republican hands. It will come in two parts:
(a) Terri will die, and the pro-lifers will never forgive the Bushes or the Republicans for cowardice in the face of evil, and
(b) the Nuclear Option will not be passed, so the judiciary will not be conservative.
And the denoument is that in 2006 and 2008, 2010 and thereafter, the Christian pro-lifers stay home by the millions. Their leaders, the committed partisan ones, will not be able to overcome their cynicism and sense of having been used and fought to give power to worldly, duplicitous men.
If the Christians leave, absolutely nothing will bring them back for a generation. They are for the most part completely sincere, committed, single-issue moralists. Lie to them and betray them, and they see it in Biblical terms. The Bushes as Pilate, the Republicans as Judas and the like. They do not calculate advantages.
Most are rather poor, and will be least affected by the reversal of the Republican economic agenda entailed by the new Democrat majority. Income taxes, capital gains taxes, payroll taxes, dividends taxes and estate taxes will all go back up. Social Security will be "saved" by tax increases. The economy will suffer, of course, but Christians will suffer along with it. Mammon is secondary to most of the committed pro-lifers.
Lose the pro-lifers, and the "Roe Effect" that folks like James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal write about giving the Republican Right a demographic advantage for the foreseeable future evaporates. The Roe Effect only gives the Republicans an advantage if the reproducing Christian pro-lifers believe that the Republicans are really pro-life. And right now we really do not.
We believe that the Republicans have talked a good game and roped us along like dopes for thirty years when they knew, and we knew, that they really couldn't change Roe or do anything about the Judiciary.
But now they can, and this past week they needed to.
They refused to use their power for life in the case of Terri, and indicated that they will not even use it in the Senate to override the minority Democrat filibuster and get in a pro-life Judiciary.
This reveals them as liars, and us a pawns.
We cannot unmake them liars, although they could reverse our sense of betrayal by moving now, even in this late hour, to save Terri and to pass the Nuclear Option.
They don't want to.
We certainly will unmake ourselves as pawns.
The Republican Party can be saved, still, if it will yield.
All it has to do is to do what it said it was going to do for thirty years. Install the judges, and defend life by saving Terri.
That's not hard, unless you really don't care about abortion except as an issue to keep the braying Christian dopes in ranks to keep your majority and agenda alive.
Too late. The dopes are awake and angry and heartbroken.
Characteristically, the Republican leadership is too arrogantly confident of its ability to manage events to take the observations of folks like me seriously.
We are, still, trying to SAVE you guys by telling you in simple terms what we NEED you to do:
(1) Save Terri like you said you would, and
(2) Pass the Nuclear Option and get the pro-life judges up there.
That's it.
That's all.
I read people bellyaching about how the Christians have "hijacked" the Republican party.
BS!
We have had one single issue of importance: abortion, for thirty years. It is not "hijacking" the party to make it overtly and explicitly clear that to get our votes you have to use your power to outlaw abortion. That is the deal, always was. To do that, it means changing the judiciary, and where necessary, facing down the judiciary where it overreaches in a new effort to attack life. The Schiavo case is emblematic of that, and required action.
What we got were words and words and words, as before, but no action.
What you are going to get for that is action.
We leave. The party divides and falls, and you get your taxes hiked back up again.
It is brutally simple: to keep your taxes low, support life. That's not being hijacked, that was always the deal.
We are not going to renegotiate the deal, and it shouldn't be a Mexican standoff here, because you AGREED TO THE DEAL for the past 30 years. Now it is time for you to PERFORM, and you don't want to. That's a betrayal. The Christians are not going to trust you again if you don't change you mind real quick.
Pass the Nuclear Option and save Terri. Then nominate conservative judges who will overturn Roe. That's the deal. Always was. Honor it and keep the majority.
Dishonor it and lose the Christians and the majority.
Between here and there, what Christians can do is send back their fundraising letters with a simple note: "I will send you my annual check when you've passed the Nuclear Option. Thank you."
I read just fine. Nice attempt to save face though.
"I never whined nor bitched nor misrepresented."
I never said you bitched. But you did whine and misrepresent.
Now you're going to shut up. Have a nice day.
LOL, you have delusions of grandeur. Any more directives and orders before they take you back to your little room? Are you the King or the Queen in your little fantasy world? LOL
"Most of them like to get re-elected. Others like to well thought of by their friends. Schiavo has made this more than just a partisan battle that the Republicans can win. Now its rationality vs emotionality."
Rationality, emotionality, doesn't really matter.
We are not ruled by reason or emotion, but by representatives chosen by voters. A vote cast on emotion is precisely as valid as a vote cast based on reason. There is no "rationality requirement" to cast a valid vote.
One branch of the Republican Party is determined to not honor its promises of thirty years to another branch of the party, because honoring that pledge will evoke an immediate firestorm of bitter emotional protests mostly from people who don't vote Republican anyway, but also from pro-choice economic Republicans.
Republicans have to choose which part of their base to alienate: the Christians or the economic pro-choice conservatives.
The RATIONAL answer is to give the Christians what they want, because economic pro-choice conservatives are PRIMARILY interested in money and economics, and they will only get higher taxes and regulation from the Democrats if they refuse to vote for the Republican Party anymore because the Republicans chose to satisfy the needs of their pro-life Christian base. Angering the economic conservatives by strongly enforcing life here will not lose the economic conservatives. This is not really their issue, and they are rational actors.
By contrast, betraying the "emotional" Christians will result in their leaving the Republican party. It will not be RATIONAL for the Christians to continue to support Republicans who had the power, but did not use it to rebuke the anti-life Judiciary or Democrats either by saving Terri or applying the Nuclear Option. The economic pro-choice Republicans will be happy that they were not forced, as a party, to support a Christian cause they don't really agree with. But then the party splits, the Democrats win, and the economic conservatives get their taxes hiked anyway.
The RATIONAL thing for the Republicans to do is save Terri and pass the nuclear option, and weather out the storm of pissed off people. The Left will be furious, but doesn't vote Republican anyway. The closet pro-choice economic conservatives will be disgusted that their hand was "forced" to give the pro-life Christians what they want, but the core economic agenda of the Republicans - which is the economic conservatives' REAL issue - will be protected. And the pro-lifers will be more loyal than ever.
Demographics means that the Christians will be more and more important in coming elections. The Christians are emotional right now, and their emotions will take millions of them right out of the party if the party continues to betray them on obvious life issues: Terri and the Nuclear Option.
If the Republicans satisfy them, there will be a hellstorm of emotion on the other side, mostly Democrats. Economic Republicans will ALSO be angry, but they have to master their emotions with reason and remember that from having the Christians in political harness, they have managed to get their economic agenda.
The economic pro-choice (libertarian) Republicans believe, quite irrationally, that they can get their whole economic agenda AND not have to enact a pro-life agenda. The numbers do not exist to do that. At all. It is not rational to believe you're going to have a low tax, deregulated economy and euthanasia and abortion on demand. The Christians won't support that, and the economic pro-choice libertarians are not an expanding minority nor a plurality.
You note that politicians want to get re-elected.
Yes, they do.
So, if they move to save Terri and pass the Nuclear Option, why do they not get re-elected?
Because the Democrats go wild with fury?
Democrats don't vote for Republicans anyway. The people who will go wild with fury over the saving of Terri and the invocation of the nuclear option vote Democratic.
Because the economic Republicans will be very angry about "government intervention"?
Yes, they might be.
But let's be rational.
The Republicans have enacted almost the whole agenda of the economic right. If the Democrats win, the whole economic agenda of the right will be dismantled completely.
So, will the economic right be irrational and emotional two years hence and vote against its own interest by voting against the Republicans for taking a pro-life stance?
No.
Where else do the economic Republicans have to go?
Will they vote to hike their own taxes and eliminate their capital gains and dividends tax breaks because they are furious at Republicans for saving a woman's life and getting pro-choice judges on the judiciary two years ago?"
No.
The rational thing for the Republican leadership to do right now is to infuriate the Left and placate the Christians by invoking the Nuclear Option and intervening to save Terri Schiavo.
Any clear-headed analysis makes that clear.
The Republicans are not doing it, because economic Republicans are also closet pro-choicers, for the most part, and they are in command of the party. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
This week, with the Schiavo case and waffling on the nuclear option, the economic conservatives are asserting their command of the party. Yes, they can refuse to intervene to save Terri, and yes, they can refuse to pass the Nuclear Option. But in 2006 they will discover the stark limits of their power, because no, they cannot behave that way and keep the Christians in the same party with them.
I see the brave efforts at spin going on now, to try and focus the Christian pro-lifers' anger on the Democrats. Not going to work.
We already know that the Democrats are life-hating thralls of evil.
But we also know that the Republicans have the power. They are the majority in all six branches of government that looked at the Schiavo case, and all six branches failed to protect life.
They are the large majority in the Senate. They COULD pass the Nuclear Option. They don't because they don't want to.
Christian pro-lifers know who has the power, and they know who is denying them the victory by choosing to do the WRONG thing on two explosive, core issues.
The spin machine is not going to be able to divert Christian anger away from the Republicans, where it belongs, to the Democrats. We already know they are evil.
We expected you to use your power to prevent the evil from doing its worse. That is why we have sent you thousands of dollars and manned the political trenches for you for 30 years. We gave you the power. We demand that you use it for what we gave it to you for. You have refused to do so. You claim you do not have the power. We reject that. You do. Don't lie to us. We are not stupid.
There is no place for you to hide.
Perhaps the economic right is thinking emotionally.
They do not like to be "threatened", and so they are digging in and becoming belligerent.
That is irrational.
We are demanding that you fulfill 30 years of promises.
It is not irrational to demand that you uphold your end of the deal. It is not irrational to become furiously angry and to abandon you as Judases and liars if you do not.
It is irrational of you to believe that you can walk out on the Christians and retain power.
And it is irrational of you to believe that Christian anger at being betrayed is not legitimate.
It is also supremely irrational of you to look at the electorate and believe that you can maintain your majority and the rest of your agenda in the next elections if you alienate the Christians now.
It's show time.
Stand and deliver and keep the Christians.
Do anything else, anything at all, and you have irrationally granted yourselves wiggle room that does not exist.
You have none. You have to act. If Terri and the Nuclear Option die, the Republican Party dies with them.
That's the cold, hard, rational reality of the situation.
Republicans have to face up to it and act rationally to save their political skins. And that means caving to the Christians this time.
Drop dead.
AM, take a look at this guy's post. Trollbait.
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