Conservatives Drowning In Their Own Bile:
The Terri Schiavo carnival of unending doom continues, and "conservative" pundits are going nutzoid trying to out-empathize each other and condemn the opposition. It's one of those sad, funny sights, like a morbidly obese guy at a hot dog eating contest, shoving those weiners into his engorged cheeks, his bloated gut undulating as he swallows. The image itself is funny, but it's just pathetic 'cause we know that fat fuck is gonna shovel that shit in until his heart just gives out. And, Christ, the size of the coffin we're gonna need when that happens.

Take, for instance, Thomas Sowell, who loves it when the guys at the White House call him "Uncle," who says, "The extraordinary session of Congress, calling members back from around the country, with the President flying back from his home in Texas in order to be ready to sign legislation dealing with Terri Schiavo, are things that do us credit as a nation." Sowell, like so many others, condemns Michael Schiavo for daring to have been the husband to the woman in the bed before she was an abstraction, an amorphous concept: "Legally, he is Terri's guardian and that legal technicality is all that gives him the right to starve her to death." That's right; according to Sowell, guardianship, when one often takes on a stunning amount of responsibility out of love and compassion, is merely a "legal technicality."

Grandparents who become guardians for children after they've been abandoned by their parents? Your guardian position is merely some mumbo-jumbo lawyers use to fuck over the rest of us. Children who look after their aged parents, slowly, inexorably fading away due to Alzheimer's? Sowell and his fellow conservatives shit on your status.

Uber-scold Cal Thomas, who has got to change that Grecian Formula-infused photo of himself looking as if he's contemplating getting tea-bagged by Billy Graham, pretends to do grave philosophical grappling about Schiavo. We must choose, Thomas babbles, between two philosophies of life: "One philosophy says we are mere material and energy shaped by pure chance in a random universe, evolving from slime with no Author of life, no purpose for living beyond what gives us pleasure and no destination after we die but the grave. The other philosophy of life says we are created by an infinite, personal God who has a plan for every life in every situation and circumstance and that no one should take a life except under the most extreme circumstances and only through due process or in self-defense."

In Thomas's Victorian world, we can either be carnal animals in an amoral world or godly, blessed beings. Of course, Thomas doesn't deal with the theological implications of keeping Schiavo alive only through a tube that puts goo into her body, and unless he can find a Bible quote that says, "Yea, the Lord maketh the feeding tube in order to lengthen the life of a non-sentient being as long as she may unnaturally be kept alive," he ain't gonna.

Thomas then goes batshit insane, with the kind of rhetoric that, in a civilized nation, would have him locked into Bedlam with the rest of the screaming lunatics: "Having been conditioned to accept killing, even killing by the state according to an arbitrary standard of who is 'fit' to live and who is not, it will be a short step to killing Grandma and Grandpa in their 'assisted living' centers, which quickly will be transformed into centers for assisted dying." Man, the Rude Pundit can't wait until all that tasty soylent green is on the supermarket shelves.

David Limbaugh continues the insistence that this is all some grand plan to kill lots of people: "Could it be that something besides Terri's wishes motivates many of the death-soldiers, such as an allegiance to the culture of death, or some abject, inhumane resentment that we spend so much money keeping severely disabled people alive?" David Limbaugh writing at his keyboard is like a teenager in college who discovers he's flexible enough to suck his own dick. For weeks, he's gonna perfect his self-knob-bobbing, fellating his own cock for all he's worth. Finally, when someone catches him, doubled over in the dorm bed, doing his deed, all he can say is, "Well, shit, I'm just doing it because I can." This "culture of death" includes, one presumes, abortion, right-to-die issues, and Quentin Tarantino movies. It's another way to degrade the "intellectual" left, perhaps, and Limbaugh does it because he can.

Yes, there have been conservatives who were appalled at the intervention by Congress, but most have been crass bullshit propagandists and/or ignorant phelgm spitters. Some pretend to be doctors or believe desperately in miracles, like Peggy Noonan, who wrote, "Life is mysterious. Medicine is full of happenings and events that leave brilliant doctors scratching their heads." Noonan, like most of the pro-feeding tube crowd, compares Schiavo's situation to abortion, infantilizing her, taking away her voice completely.

And there's the truth of the matter, no? Those who want Terri Schiavo to be forced to live need those miracles because it will be as if she has come full-term, like a fetus. It is paternalism, sexism, and degradation.

In the end, it is her husband who, with the agreement of every court that's heard the case, wants to give voice, give agency, to the adult.

(The Rude Pundit is done with this, as should we all be. Barring something even more appalling, like sending the National Guard to protect Schiavo or Tom DeLay swooping in, Batman-style, tomorrow the Rude Pundit is moving on.)