Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Updated: 9:22 a.m. ET Feb. 2, 2006
Guests: Michael Schiavo, Richard Wolffe, Melanie Lomax, Mo Rocca
KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST: Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?
Michael Schiavo, 10 months later, a former Republican now forming a political action committee, a PAC, to challenge the politicians who involved themselves in the life and death of his wife, Terri.
MICHAEL SCHIAVO, TERRI SCHIAVO‘S HUSBAND: This should not have happened, Keith. These politicians should not knocked on my door.
Our fourth story on the COUNTDOWN, the man who felt the most but said the least, Michael Schiavo, Terri Schiavo‘s husband. He and I spoke this morning. We‘ll be bringing you our conversation at length tomorrow night here on COUNTDOWN. Tonight, a preview, and some perspective.
Terri Schiavo collapsed at home in 1990. After years of attempts at rehabilitation, she still remained in what doctors had diagnosed repeatedly as a persistent vegetative state. Her husband, Michael, said she never wanted to be kept alive artificially and filed a petition to have her feeding tube removed.
Her family said she did want to be kept alive, and they went to court for seven years, trying to keep the feeding tube in.
When the courts finally decided to allow Michael Schiavo to remove his wife‘s tube, hundreds of people gathered in protest outside and hospice, some even getting symbolically arrested trying to bring her water.
But it was the politicians, led by then-House majority leader Tom DeLay in the House, along with the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, and by the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, and his brother, the president, who made all this a rallying cry for several movements, including the pro-life movement, bringing the case to Congress to pass a bill aimed at an 11th-hour attempt to force the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo‘s feeding tube.
And, as her husband told me in an exclusive interview, their interference is the reason he has now started his own political action committee, named Terri‘s PAC, after his wife, dedicated to exposing the people he says used this tragedy for their own political agenda.
SCHIAVO: This should not have happened, Keith. These politicians should not knocked on my door. And I‘m sure you would feel the same way if it was you, sitting there making a personal decision about your loved one and your own personal life, and you have these people that never even met you, never even knew you, that all of a sudden are knocking on your door saying, You can‘t do this.
It‘s not right. This is America.
OLBERMANN: But you say knocking on the door, and yet they didn‘t really knock on the door, they sort of just came through the wall, didn‘t they?
SCHIAVO: Exactly. Well, that‘s a better statement.
LBERMANN: If they had knocked on the door...
SCHIAVO: No knocking, they just walked right in.
OLBERMANN: Yes, if they had knocked on the door, if literally one of them had said, I want to meet you, and I want to come see her, what would you have said?
SCHIAVO: Come on down. I invited the president. I invited Governor Bush. Come down, meet me. Come down and ask Terri, Here, Terri, shake my hand. She wouldn‘t have done it. Terri, can you look at me for a while and talk to me? She wouldn‘t have done it.
The autopsy has proved that. Terri was cortically blind, something that has been said in courts for years. Dr. Cranford was the first neurologist to sit there and say she was cortically blind. And the autopsy proved that. Terri was blind. Terri couldn‘t talk. She couldn‘t swallow. The autopsy proved that. Terri‘s brain was half the size of the—a normal brain. That‘s how much it had shrunk.
OLBERMANN: My exclusive interview with Michael Schiavo, tomorrow night here on COUNTDOWN, 8:00 and midnight Eastern, 5:00 and 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Oh, I just love this interview so far! Looking forward to the rest of it tonight. Thanks for the info. I'll have to bring my barf-o-meter and my barf-bag to make it through it, I suppose.
According to medline
Untreated severe dehydration may result in seizures, permanent brain damage, or death.Symptoms in an infant include "Markedly sunken fontanelles (the soft spot on the top of the head) in an infant"
George Greer is a politician, on the government payroll, an agent of government. George Greer IS the "government interference" in this case. It was precisely his officious interference into private matters that prevented Terri's family from having any say in her medical care. Michael Schiavo has no objection to politician Greer, who granted his every demand, legal or not.
Mr. Schiavo does not have the onions or the honesty to say that it is not politicians he objects to, but people in or out of government who think he's a vile murderer.