Irrational Politicians Create Angst

Eleven days before Terri Schiavo died, Tom DeLay declared: "Terri Schiavo is not brain dead. She talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support."

Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican and a physician from Oklahoma, said: "All you have to do is look at her on TV. Any doctor with any conscience can look at her and know that she does not have a terminal disease and know that she has some function."

Thanks to an autopsy, however, now we know without a doubt that they were full of beans. Terri Schiavo could not feel, think or see.

In fact, she had no function and was, in essence, a cadaver on life support.

Her personhood and her soul - as we define it - had departed that body which was being kept alive for two reasons: 1) to punish Michael Schiavo for having the audacity of trying to get on with his life and 2) because the Schindlers refused to let go and get on with theirs.

It takes a lot of love to act rationally and look at facts. It takes a lot of strength to let go. It takes a lot of integrity to not call people names when they are defaming your character.

Michael Schiavo appears to have been the only sane and loving person involved in the Terri Schiavo fiasco and he has been vindicated.

But have these irrational - and shamelessly manipulative - politicians apologized for helping to create such angst in the American psyche?

Of course not. No apologies, no regrets, no retractions, no consequences.

Instead - and to his shame - Governor Jeb Bush is holding a grudge. He has been proved to be a politician who - like the others - catered to irrationality to get support from angry and frightened people who - for all their talk about God - obviously have no belief in an after life or they would not fear death so much.

Either that or they believe in an ogre of a God that is going to punish them mercilessly for eating that extra pint of ice cream while holding back on the tithes.

There are two lessons here.

First: we need medicine and science. Human emotions are not reliable indicators of reality - especially when the emotions that serve as our lens of perception are primarily anger and fear. Anything else is like handing our decision making over to angry ferrets.

Two: These leaders - who hold the fate of our country, and the fate of other countries such as Iraq in their hands - are irrational and clueless.

They make decisions without evidence and/or as strategy to garner support from people operating from the lowest emotional denominator, fear.

There's a great irony here how they feed the fear that the State will kill you all so they can get more political power so that the State can kill you.

Because it's not that the protestors are wrong in principle.

Not at all. They fear that government will kill people unnecessarily.

Probably because the government already kills people unnecessarily. The State is killing Americans in Iraq by the hundreds and Iraqis - who are not even counted as people - by the thousands.

The State has tortured people to death in Abu Ghraib.

And, of course - yawn - hardly worth mentioning that the State executes people by the hundreds.

Add it all up and the state kills a lot of people.

In fact, President Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, signed the Advance Directive Act giving physicians the right to override a guardian's decision and desire to keep a loved one alive if the physician and an ethics committee thought that keeping the patient alive was futile.

So Bush as Governor would have been in favor of pulling the plug on Schiavo.

But he didn't mention that during the Schiavo debacle.

Truth is, he's AC/DC. What ever current of public opinion serves his purpose - Alive or Dead - he can argue it. Either way.

He'll argue to "save" a dead body yet argue for an optional war that turns alive and healthy people into dead bodies.

He'll rile up people for all the wrong reasons and then direct them in disastrous policies of decimating our army and keeping a dead body alive in perpetuity.

That's Bush-Think.

He is one sick puppy.