Posted on 04/03/2005 4:15:09 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Anyone would think it was the Republicans who'd lost the 2004 elections, and the 2002 elections, and the 2000 elections. From every corner, concerned "friends" of the party rise to offer "friendly" advice. Norman Lear, who produced all those critically acclaimed issue-confronting heroine-gets-an-abortion '70s sitcoms that seem a lot more dated than ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' these days, has now produced a People For the American Way ad in which a man who identifies himself as a "common sense Republican" objects to any attempt to end the Democratic filibuster of Bush's judicial nominees. As things turn out, the "common sense Republican" has so much common sense he's an official with a union that endorsed John Kerry.
Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:
"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."
Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.
Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.
The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.
The notion, for example, that poor Terri Schiavo will cost Republicans votes in a year and a half's time is ludicrous. The best distillation of the pro-Schiavo case was made by James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, responding to the provocateur Christopher Hitchens' dismissal of her as a "non-human entity." "It is not wise," wrote Lileks, "to call people dead before they are actually, well, dead. You can be 'as good as dead' or 'brain dead' or 'close to death,' but if the heart beats and the chest rises, I think we should balk at saying this constitutes dead, period."
Just so. Once you get used to designating living, breathing bodies as "non-human entities," it's easy to bandy them ever more carelessly -- as they do in the eminently progressive Netherlands, where their relaxed attitude to pot and prostitution led to a relaxed attitude to euthanasia which looks like relaxing the Dutch people right out of business. It's all done quietly over there -- no fuss, no publicity; you go in to hospital with a heavy cold and you're carried out by the handles. (By "handles," I mean a coffin, not a ceremonial phalanx of Monteagles and Princetons.) But that's not the American way. This is a legalistic society, where grade schools can't have kids knocking a ball around without getting a gazillion dollars worth of liability insurance. I was in Price Chopper the other day and they had a little basket of Easter samples on display accompanied by a page of full print outlining the various sub-clauses of the company's "tasting policy." That's America. In Holland, you can taste a cookie without signing a legal waiver, and, if you get food poisoning from it, the doctor will discreetly euthanize you to avoid putting your family through the trauma of waiting six hours for the stomach pump to become available. That's not how the American cookie crumbles. Euthanasia here will be a 10-year court culminating in slow-motion public execution played out on the 24-hour cable channels.
The Republicans did the right thing here, and they won't be punished for it by the electors. As with abortion, this will be an issue where the public moves slowly but steadily toward the conservative position: Terri Schiavo's court-ordered death will not be without meaning. As to "crack-ups," that's only a neurotic way of saying that these days most of the intellectual debate is within the right. If, like the Democrats, all you've got are lockstep litmus tests on race and abortion and all the rest, what's to crack up over? You just lose elections every two years, but carry on insisting, as Ted Kennedy does, that you're still the majority party. Ted's quite a large majority just by himself these days, but it's still not enough.
Why thank you!
You must have me confused with someone else. Everyone has their own thoughts and are untitled to them. I suppose you can include me in on the WPPFF because I don't agree with attacking anyone because they don't agree with my opinion.
There have been some "wild" things going on here but it's not gonna scare me off. LOL :^)
You probably are wppff then, or as I like to think, just a good old freeper.
I was too.
You will find in any group of humans, a wide spectrum of beliefs. Some Dems are more like Reps, and vice-versa. Don't get mad at the people who should have acted the way you wanted...Rail-Against-The-Machine (work for changes in the laws, and in attitudes of the people)...
Freepmail for you.
Oh God. I don't want to fight with you. I'll give you one chance though, ........WHAT do you proclaim that I am saying that I know to be false? What?
Why do you chose to be so contentious, especially on this particularly sad day? Must you pick a fight today?
"Oh yes, characterizing someone who has been vilified (falsely and baselessly) who then arrives to present facts as engaging in a pity party is so "right".
LOL"
Facts presented???? Oh yes I remember that Court transcript, and Wolfson report, yes those facts. Vilified, you mean like Tom Delay, and President Bush for cutting short his vacation.
You mean the attempt to smear any and all who believe that this judge usurped his authority to sentence one to death, as being a bunch of Randall Terry/Keyes/Jackson heretics.
Nobody was -- Karen Quinlan was taken off her respirator in 1976, but tube feeding was continued until her death in 1986.
The Cruzan case was more recent. Matthew J. Franck in "The Court of the Problem" (NRO, March 30, 2005) describes the legal steps from Quinlan through Curzan to Schiavo. For Cruzan:
That year, 1990, the Court decided the case of Nancy Cruzan, whose medical circumstances were strikingly similar to those of Terri Schiavo: Injured in a car accident in 1983, she was subsequently diagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS), with no hope of recovery, and she was being fed and hydrated via a gastrostomy tube inserted directly into her stomach. The contending parties in Nancy Cruzan's case were her parents, who wished her feeding tube withdrawn, and the state of Missouri, whose laws — as interpreted by the state supreme court — required "clear and convincing evidence" of an unambiguous intent on the part of the patient in such a state before a presumption in favor of preserving life could be overcome. The state's high court held against the withdrawal of Cruzan's feeding tube, and the U.S. Supreme Court (by the barest 5-4 vote) affirmed that ruling, holding that it was consistent with due process for a state to place a heavy evidentiary burden on anyone who claimed to enunciate the desire for death on behalf of an incompetent person.
Franck argues that the seed of the Schiavo decisions were sown in Cruzan, when the majority opinion affirmed the right of a competent person to choose to have his own feeding tube removed, which opened the door to a guardian making that decision.
Think about this for a moment. Can anyone name a case in which a competent person, who was not already dying of an underlying disease or injury, chose to refuse food and water in order to bring about his death? It seems unlikely, since anyone who was aware, able to communicate, and not dying could hardly be expected to choose a mode of death so drawn out — and even less could such a patient be expected to "stay the course" without relenting and begging for water and food. Indeed, a patient who was aware, able to communicate, and not dying might well find his sanity — i.e., his competence — questioned if he made the request.. . .In short, Rehnquist's preposterously invented "right" was the Court's way of blessing a practice called "substituted judgment": the process, varying from state to state, by which parents, spouses, or other close kin establish to a court's satisfaction either that when the patient was competent, he did express a desire not to live as an otherwise healthy incompetent, or (in states a bit more lax) that if he had thought about it when he was competent, it would have been his desire not so to live.
A huge part of the republican party is the religious wing with very strong convictions.The passion and emotion displayed here recently are evidence of those convictions.
If our party can not take serious debate among us then we might as well drink Koolaid.
I saw something the other day that, quite frankly, has me very concerned. Check it out yourself and then comment: http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/poll?poll=87
Thanks and BTT.
Thanks for posting Mark's article. I haven't laughed so hard in over two weeks.
Now please, I don't have the frame of mind to fight with you today, but I always feel that I should answer your posts no matter what you say.
In the end FR will be stronger. Nothing will weaken this site! Many FReepers have said it well here over the past days --- FR will only be stronger after all this.
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A Freeper, Billthedrill, said the following yesterday morning. It’s very fitting and very wise.
“We would all be better off if we would ask the other party (poster) what he or she thinks instead of telling them. It's almost always a mischaracterization, and it brings more heat than light.”
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The reason is that the phrase " Persistent Vegetative State " was always used in describing her condition, and was used in the often quoted poll.
^^^^
That phrase needs to go down the memory hole to join "crippled" and other words that used to be in common usage.
Scientists are learning more every day about the function of the brain. One recent observation of tested patients who had minimal or no response to ordinary stimuli, showed brain activity similar to the control subjects, when tapes of a loved one's voice or familiar music was played.
A human being can never be a vegetable. The term arose from callousness by medical staff when viewing the severely compromised. Medicine, and respect for patients, has come a long way since that term was popularized.
We do still have gray areas in our laws that don't meet every situation.
I would have loved to see someone find a legal way to save Terri but it never happened..so it seems. As for Greer's part..what he did was legal in any sense of the word but his competency is at issue when he did not allow certain facts.
Terri's tragedy spotlighted a loophole (or two) that needs to be addressed by the Florida constituents and possibly the Legislature.
My sister leans heavily Democrat, she almost cried talking to me on the phone about the wrongness of starving her to death.
Nope, I did not mean any of your mischaracterizations.
You brought up the wppff for mockery back in post #9. I am tired of you saying whatever you want and when I respond you say you don't want to fight with me as if I started something.
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