The Final Straw?

Many of us have been watching Tom DeLay's ethically-challenged hypocrisy, watching Rumsfeld and Rice mangling foreign policy, insulting nation after nation, watching George hisseff dare to fiddle with Social Security while Medicare burns, and wondering when a majority will finally realize that they've been royally had. Strangely, it may be a woman who has been comatose for 15 years who will finally bring them down.

Tom "The Hammer" DeLay saw the light at the end of his troubles when the Florida courts decided that Terri Schiavo's husband had the right to decide to discontinue treatment for his wife, diagnosed by her doctors and a court-appointed neurologist as being in a "permanent vegetative state". The end result of the decision to discontinue treatment, including a feeding tube, would of course be her death, and the wingnuts in the movement that claims to revere life couldn't tolerate any death (except for all the others that they can tolerate). But that hypocrisy aside, they didn't have to work very hard to convince DeLay and Bush and Bill Frist to hold a special session of Congress on a Sunday night when they would otherwise have been in recess, just to pass legislation that would transfer the case to federal courts, a vast overreach that makes a mockery of the presumed importance of states' rights in the pantheon of Republican ideology.

So, why did DeLay et al. do this? What possible motivation could they have? While the Congressmen and President Bush trotted out their Sunday best speeches about the necessity of favoring life, ABC uncovered the awful truth: they saw the whole thing as a wedge issue! Thus the light at the end of the tunnel. But it turns out the light may have been a train headlight. It seems the public sees through this. Even a majority of Repubs, self-described conservatives and self-described evangelicals thinks Congess should have stayed out of it all. Today, as the court case wound its way up to the Supremes, and brother Jeb tried to use some dummied up 'new evidence' to get the Florida legislature to step in yet again, the news got even worse for the R's, as a new CBS poll shows both Congress and Bush at new approval lows. Hard to know for sure that this is related to the Schiavo case. It also overlaps with the Bush Social Security road show. But it isn't so far-fetched. A great many people understand the torment of having a loved one in a hospital and having to make, or watch them make, life or death decisions. That personal connection accounts for the attention so many are paying to this story. And the only thing more traumatic than having to make such a decision would likely be having some stranger tell you they were going to make it for you.

Alas, poor Tom. I knew thee well.

DEMOPHOENIX