No One Will Remember Her Name
06 November 2006 6:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
No One Will Remember Her Name
guest post by Ed Encho
“One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America” – Tom DeLay
“Why do you liberals want Terri Schiavo to die?” - Rush Limbaugh
If there is one example that embodies every aspect of the foulness of the Republican hostile takeover of America it would be the gross, sordid and utterly distasteful exploitation of poor Terri Schiavo during which her artificially nourished wasting body that lay in a persistent vegetative state was used as nothing more than an object or a political football that could be utilized to mobilize and further the interests of the most extremist and reactionary elements of our society.
Depending on what happens at the polls tomorrow the exploitation of Terri Schiavo may one day be seen as a turning point as well as the beginning of the end for the cloak of secrecy that the radical theocratic agenda that the fundamentalist Christian right and their allies at the highest levels of government had enjoyed for so long that allowed them to slowly chip away at the pillars of the very foundations of of our democracy while being dismissed as fringe dwelling freaks and borderline whackos rather than recognized as the very serious menace to a free and fair society that they truly are.
Some Republican strategist (I believe that it was Frank Luntz) when asked about the potential for political fallout very disdainfully commented that nobody would remember her name come election time. This was said despite widespread public disapproval over the meddling of the government in what was in actuality a sad and tragic family feud that was exploited by a cacophony of parasites who reduced it to yet another of the tabloid bread and circuses events that so enthrall and amuse Americans whose utmost need is to be entertained and to live vicariously through the constant flow of 'human interest' stories that allow them to escape from their mundane daily lives through the cheap voyeurism delivered into their living rooms by the electronic crack pipe.
Given the shortened attention spans and fleeting memories of a television addled public there is much truth in that very cynical assessment so I would like to perform my civic duty in retrieving it from the memory hole for the benefit of those seeking to hold Mr. Luntz, Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush, Mr. Frist and the rest of the amoral charlatans who seem to have escaped accountability for their dastardly behavior back in the spring of 2005 for their rape of Terri Schiavo in order to score political points accountable for their actions on this election eve.
The last pre-election news cycle is of course being dominated today by the fortuitously timed Saddam Hussein guilty verdict and his sentence to death by hanging which will give the Bush-Rove-Cheney Axis of Evil a guaranteed black out of any relevant news leading up to Tuesday’s critical mid-term election as well as a license to kill when it comes to attacking Democrats for non-support of the war in Iraq. Saddam was a blood thirsty butcher and his departure from this planet is a very good thing but unfortunately the conviction for crimes committed in 1982 will ensure that he never has to answer for the gassing of his own people with the materials sold to him by Reagan and sealed with a handshake from Rummy. Dead men tell no tales and if the Bush junta ever ends up in the dock at The Hague Saddam won’t be around to sing his song but that is however a story for another time.
I digress….
The behavior of the ruling Republicans and the theocrats who have entered into a symbiotic relationship with them should be of the utmost of importance to Americans as they cast their votes on Tuesday for the implications of what would happen if those responsible were not punished at the ballot box for their shameful involvement in the Terri Schiavo circus. I am not going to go at length into rehashing the entire morbid saga but only emphasize a few points that need to be made that relate to what is at stake tomorrow and to stress that turnout is essential. Even if the recent exposure of Pastor Ted Haggard as yet another of the deviate hypocrites that are so prevalent in the extreme right somewhat keeps evangelicals from voting be advised that the Republican ground game is as formidable as that of the Wehrmacht and it is going to take a monumental effort to overcome it and the obvious problems with the voting machines that are already beginning to seep out.
The do-nothing 109th Congress that has allowed the treasury to be looted, the constitution to be gutted, our troops to become cannon fodder trapped in the middle of a civil war due to the whims of those seeking absolution for their failed policies in Vietnam, our borders to remain porous (despite the window dressing bill that created a fence too short and without funding), our environmental protections sold out to corporate plunderers and our jobs to be off shored by the thousands in order to allow the rentier plutocrats to reap their ill gotten gains from Wall Street did manage to move heaven and earth in order to intervene in passing emergency legislation to pander to their base in the name of Terri Schiavo and some fraudulent crusade under the banner of being pro-life. And in yet another blatant example of the image makers’ stagecraft an allegedly slumbering George W. Bush was brought the new bill at just past one in the morning where he was awakened of sugar plum laced dreams to affix his signature on the bill outside his bedroom in his jammies and bunny slippers. It was the culmination of a stupendous fraud and to many Republicans was the greatest show on earth
The entire pro-life movement’s sincerity rings hollow when it does not extend to brown skinned children being starved by economic sanctions or becoming ‘collateral damage’ in ill-conceived foreign wars. The bumper sticker sloganeering also doesn’t extend to children after they are born who are in very un-Christian manner abandoned by a predatory neoliberal Social Darwinist government with an Ahab like obsession with not only destroying but ultimately discrediting the New Deal and every accomplishment of FDR and if the Republicans are allowed to retain control look for another big offensive to privatize social security in order to fuel the profits of Wall Street allies who will snort like the greedy pigs they are all of the way to the bank with wheel barrows full of taxpayer funded commission fees.
The most recent example of this is the law that does not provide access to Medicaid to newborn children of illegal immigrants who are by definition American citizens or as the right-wing demagogues like to derisively refer to them: anchor babies. This is a perfect bridge to the run of the mill racists who are lured by the siren songs of nationalism and immigrant bashing who exalt the formation of paramilitary militia groups to police the southern U.S. border and whose contempt for Mexicans is exploited by raving fanatics like Colorado’s Tom Tancredo who also once advocated blowing up Islamic religious shrines as retribution for insurgent attacks.
During the Schiavo extravaganza while sanctimonious authoritarian bloodsuckers like the Republican leaders of both houses of Congress Bill Frist and Tom DeLay railed against the murderous liberals who would allow Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube to be removed in order for her to die a humane death the selective morality and respect for the sanctity of life did not extend to poor little five-month old named Sun Hudson was removed from the machines that were preserving his precarious grip on life in a Texas children’s hospital? His breathing tube was cruelly yanked out without his parent’s consent and Tom Delay was nowhere to be found despite the fact that the Houston location was well within smelling distance of his home district.
Sun’s mother, Wanda tearfully told reporters after her son’s blue teddy bear pajama clad body was taken away, “I talked to him, I told him that I loved him. Inside of me, my son is still alive.” Texas law allows for the terminally ill to be removed from life support systems if they are unable to pay their hospital bills despite whatever the family’s wishes may be. Where was the media frenzy? where was the U.S. Congress? Where was the President? Where were the ‘Christian’ activists? Where was Randall Terry? By the way, Sun Hudson was black. The bill that allowed for the removal of this baby from life support was signed by then Texas Governor George W. Bush in 1999, where was the outrage? The only way that the allegedly ‘religious’ right and their co-opted politicians could have cared less would have been if he were gay as well.
The Religious Right and the gutless, ‘conservatives’ without conscience with their selective and false version of ‘Christianity’ are not only thugs, hypocrites and have so dishonored the name of Jesus Christ that many Americans are turning away from religion entirely have no compassion, they have no heart, they have no decency and they have no shame. Their respect for life stops whenever it isn’t about either using abortion as the most successful mobilizing issue for a militant reactionary force in American history or on sideshows like the Schiavo carnival of perversion that are chunks of bloody red meat to the regressive kook aid sipping toads of the party base. These fundamentalist freaks have done much damage to the reputation of mainstream Christians and Evangelicals who truly seek to minister to those in the name of Christ rather than to become avengers for the Jerry Falwells, Pat Robertsons, D. James Kennedys and the rest of the pulpit pounding hell fire and damnation, praise George W. Bush and pass the collection plate goats amongst sheep who through their political connections and well funded megaphone have dragged their religion into a cesspool of hatred , corruption and intolerance.
Where might I ask is the Christ who ministered to the poor and the downtrodden, ran the moneychangers out of the temple and preached the gospel of compassion? Certainly he is nowhere in the nation’s taxpayer subsidized megachurches/Republican party bund meeting halls where false prophets in three piece suits and a card in Karl Rove’s rolodex preach condemnation, war, cruelty, greed and bigotry from their pulpits. Jesus specifically condemned hypocrisy as he did helping the poor but not once did he ever mention gay marriage, now the top mobilizing factors for the brownshirts who have turned Christianity into a death cult and their churches into grand temples of apostasy.
The ability of the Republicans and their angry army to exploit and use people in an amoral manner was on full display when the Shiavo spectacle drew vampires like the extremist militant anti-abortionist Randall Terry who was an influential associate of one Charles Kopp who assassinated an abortion clinic doctor Barnett Slepian with a gunshot through his kitchen window in Buffalo, NY and whose rhetoric likely contributed to a wave of violence against abortion clinics perpetrated by domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph and those zealots of a similar mindset. Randall Terry attached himself like a poisonous leech to Terri Shiavo’s grieving parents whose anger and sorrow were manipulated and used in the most grotesque manner by the extreme right and the bottom feeders who typically feast off of the misery of others.
Former Los Angeles detective and white supremacist Mark Fuhrman who rose to fame for his vitriolic racism during the O.J. Simpson media bacchanal that preceded Schiavo showed up to 'research' and hastily put together a trash book entitled ‘Silent Witness’ that engaged in wild speculation and was released prior to the autopsy what showed that Schiavo’s brain had partially liquefied and there was no chance for any recovery of functionality barring a miracle therefore rendering the video diagnosis of the peckerwood pimpernel Dr. Bill Frist as valid as any of the other quack ‘medical experts’ that were dredged up to fill air time. Miracles are for suckers and fools, for the rational there is stem cell research.
And absolutely none of the political grandstanding did a damned thing for Terri Schiavo herself, while her entrapped soul remained shackled to this mortal coil by her useless and wasted body while the freaks gathered outside the hospice, interfering with the rights of others with dying relatives to spend time with their loved ones. Such selfishness. And where was the compassion for her? If the truly religious had any concern for her wouldn’t they actually be advocating for her immortal soul to finally be released so that she could go to the God that those who massed in protest claimed to serve?
Wasn’t fifteen years enough time to spend trapped in the horrible purgatory of a shell of a body that is being used as a political football? No, these idiots were too busy hauling replicas of the ten commandments throughout the land, boycotting businesses that advocate diverse views, waving rubber fetuses in front of abortion clinics and flooding congressional staffers and media outlets with threatening phone calls. The Florida judge who ruled on the case faced threats and was even kicked out of his church.
For the entire circus that was created and exploited by the ruthless operatives of the Republican party, the raging zealots of the extreme ‘Christian’ right, the corporate media and the bottom feeders like Terry, Fuhrman and the camera hogging Jesse Jackson who also saw fit to bless Pinellas Park with an appearance presented a perfect example of everything that has gone terribly wrong with this country since the ascendance of the authoritarians who have seized control of the GOP and by extension the nation itself.
‘Conservatives’ and I use this word with much empathy for those with principles who are truly horrified at all of this) were against big government before they realized that it could be used as a tool with which to beat their twisted and selective version of morality into those who refused the benediction of bigots and usurpers of our constitutionally protected rights and civil liberties.
Terri’s husband Michael Schiavo who endured harassment, vilification, slander and the fury of the Republican threocratic brownshirts who savaged him for years until the courts and the law finally prevailed offered this warning:
What they're doing is, they're making the decisions for us. That's what this country is coming down to. They're going to make the decisions for us.
The Republicans and the Religious Right raped Terri Schiavo, they violated her and they used her to promote obscene attacks on the judiciary through several mass organizing events called ‘Justice Sundays’ that were endorsed and encouraged by high government officials such as Frist and DeLay. Some Republicans in Congress even made veiled suggestions that violence against judges was coming. This is a serious threat and these are serious people. What will Bush and his thugs be able to do to further pack the courts and erode the constitution with a new lease on life provided by their holding onto the control of Congress?
The judiciary that will one day soon have to rule on whether American born citizens engaging in ‘seditious activity’ can be declared enemy combatants and disappeared. Habeas corpus has already been destroyed by the very same ghouls who used Terri Schiavo and her family as pawns for their fever dreams of theocracy. The justices on the courts that are targeted by this movement will ultimately rule on whether domestic dissenters can be tortured or simply disappeared into a secretive gulag system.
Better read up on the inquisition to see what happens when religion and politics become as one. Not that you should need any more enticement to get out and vote tomorrow.
