ERRING ON THE SIDE OF WHAT?

This Schiavo thing is…sheesh, I don’t know. Is she or isn’t she in a persistent vegetative state? Can she or can’t she smile or talk? Is her cerebral cortex liquefied or not? As the brilliant Bob Somerby points out today, there are apparently now two realities—one for the freakos and the actual reality. Somerby points out daily the way in which the pundits from all media fuck up our public discourse.

The Schiavo case is a perfect example of a comment Eric Alterman made at the panel discussion held recently at the U.S. Comedy Arts festival in Aspen. He said something along the lines of “Today’s punditry has made uninformed opinion equal to objective fact.” And so it has.

The answer to all those questions above depend on who you ask. But I must say that the Republicans are giving a command performance—it’s an object lesson in professional bullshit-slinging, fakery, and rank hypocrisy. Err on the side of life, Dear Leader says patronizingly, when he oversaw a record number of executions while governor? While he signed a bill authorizing the discontinuation of life support ("Bioethicists familiar with the Texas law said yesterday that if the Schiavo case had occurred in Texas, her husband would be the legal decision-maker and, because he and her doctors agreed that she had no hope of recovery, her feeding tube would be disconnected")? When he lied us into war a war that has claimed over 100,000 lives? When his newly-proposed budget guts health-care programs that help families and people like Terri Schiavo?

I mean, if Bush and the ‘Pukes get away with this one, this game is so over it’s not funny. If they can claim to always be for states’ rights and then tell Florida its business in this case and so forth and just have people go along with it, then we are so fucked. If the majority of Americans can’t see his bullshit for what it truly is, then they deserve whatever ruin befalls them as a result.

Unfortunately, that ruin will come to all of us, even those of us who can see right through the ruse…