Serious people can take the position that efforts to extend life must continue even when little hope of recovery exists; the Catholic Church seems to take such a position. But what do you say about a group of politicians who hypocritically seize upon such an emotive issue for short-term political gain? I say “hypocritically” thinking in particular of a certain president who as governor of Texas advocated and then signed a law which would have given Mr Schiavo exactly the rights he is now seeking to use to remove the feeding tubes from his spouse. Friedrich Nietzsche, tirading against the petty moralists of Wilhelmine Germany, uttered words that fit Dubya to a “T”: “spare us these latest speculators in idealism, who appear gussied up in Christian fundamentalism and who endeavor to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation through the abuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, the moral attitude-abuse that exhausts all conceivable patience!” … Merriam Webster defines “hypocrite” as “a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he does not hold.” The Los Angeles Times now brings us the tale of the death of Tom DeLay’s father at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in 1988. It seems that DeLay’s family (with his full participation) decided to remove the life-support and allow his brain-dead father to die in peace. Could this be the same Tom DeLay who now rails about a “culture of death” and insists that Terri Schiavo be kept on life support in defiance of her husband’s decision to do just what DeLay did in 1988? Clearly DeLay’s agenda has little to do with the ethics of life support, and much more to do with energizing the religious right and distracting attention from his enormous ethical and legal debacle. It is not surprising that DeLay would pursue such a cynical strategy. What is surprising is that the American mainstream media would fall for it, hook, line and sinker. If you needed further evidence of the gullibility of our broadcast media, or their susceptibility to manipulation in the hands of the current one-party state in Washington, here it is.
Here's the LA times piece from March 27: [link]
