Going All In and Losing Large On Schiavo:
There's a lot of motherfuckers who staked their political capital and professional credibility on the idea that Terri Schiavo was not a vegetable, that she could be healed, that Jesus loved her that much. Well, tough shit. They went all in on that bet, and now it's time to make these sons and daughters of bitches pay. Turns out that science was right and faith was wrong.

It turns out that Terri Schiavo's brainpan was just a vessel for holding a bunch of goo, not a brain. It turns out she didn't follow any fuckin' balloon or look at anyone at any time because she was blind. Oh, and she wasn't beaten, yo, although Jeb Bush will resuscitate Schiavo's corpse in order to get all C.S.I. on her ashes in order to salvage any shred of credibility he has left. (More precisely, Michael Schiavo will be forced to suffer ever more for the crime of wanting his rutabaga of a wife to be allowed to die.)

Now, Mel Martinez, the Florida Senator that led the charge for Congress to intervene in the Schiavo case, is trying to save his ass by saying that he was wrong. Bill Frist, who spoke in the Senate about how Schivao "responded" to stimulus, is now saying he never said she "responded." The Rude Pundit wouldn't trust Frist to look at a boil on someone's ass, let alone their EKG. Terri Schiavo needs to become the Willie Horton around the necks of Republicans in 2006.

And what will our fair right wing commentators, so many of whom were soooo sure back in the dark days of March that Schiavo might be able to be rehabilitated, say as we extend the "we-told-you-so" mantra? Like Charlie "I Be a Doctor" Krauthammer, who wrote, "I have tried to find out what her neurological condition actually is. But the evidence is sketchy, old and conflicting. The Florida court found that most of her cerebral cortex is gone. But 'most' does not mean all. There might be some cortex functioning. The very severely retarded or brain-damaged can have some consciousness. And we do not go around euthanizing the minimally conscious in the back wards of the mental hospitals on the grounds that their lives are not worth living."

Or David Limbaugh, who wrote, "From what I've read, while Terri is severely disabled, she's not in a so-called vegetative state, she's not in a coma, and she's not medically terminal," and later belched up more: "I detect more than a bit of intellectual dishonesty among many favoring Terri's death. They are claiming they merely want to honor Terri's wishes, yet they rely on her tainted husband, callously discount the testimony of her loving parents, blindly accept the disinformation that Terri is in a purely vegetative state, and ignore multiple firsthand accounts, including from examining physicians and nurses, that Terri is responsive, sometimes animated, and definitely wants to go on living."

Or Maggie Gallagher, who, when not selling out cheap to support marriage, wrote, "a neurologist who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1999 (and who examined Terri Schiavo several years ago) [said] that Terri is not in a vegetative state. She sometimes responds. Terri (he says) has been able to swallow pudding in the past, and can swallow her own saliva right now. With therapy, she might not even need the feeding tube. 'They are truly withholding food from a person who is awake, alert, and can eat and swallow.'" Damn, Nobel Prizes are cheap trinkets these days.

Or the mad Michelle Malkin, who wrote, "If given proper rehabilitation, Terri could learn to chew and swallow on her own as well. She is disabled, not dead." Now Malkin desperately clings to the shadows of doubt that are built into any rational scientific document.

And the good lawyer Hindrocket, the queerly-named conservative blogger on the queerly-named blog Powerline, said in March, "I think pretty much anyone who sees it thinks--she's not dead. Severely disabled, yes. Dead, no. Deliberately starving her would be a terrible thing. That's how I reacted to it, anyway...And I believe it is undisputed that Terri Schiavo has never been given the tests normally used to diagnose a persistent vegetative state, apparently because her husband refuses to allow them."

While the calls for Frist and DeLay and Bushes Jeb et George to apologize are loud and resounding, there's been little furor over the destruction of the credibility of all of our sanctimonious right wing wads of fuck. Yes, it's more important to wreck the political "leaders" of the opposition, but it'd be the cherry on the fuckin' sundae to punish their media enablers.

Meanwhile, one must feel at least some pity for the poor, deluded parents of Terri Schiavo. They have to cling to the insane hope that their daughter could have gotten better. Otherwise, to accept the coroner's report, they would have to face the horror that they artificially kept their blind, brain-melted daughter alive for years. And perhaps one needs to die with illusions than to deal with that nightmare.