Court-Ordered Starvation: Day 6

The Terri Schiavo case has the nation's attention as it chugs toward its tragic and seemingly inevitable conclusion.

For the life of me, I still cannot understand why Jeb Bush will not simply send the highway patrol into the hospice to take Terri into protective custody. Diddling around in the court system is a waste of time. This entire case is about the runaway courts to begin with. It's time for a constitutional showdown between the judicary on the one hand, and the legislative and executive branches on the other. Enough motions and stays already. Such nonsense simply acknowledges the false legitimacy of the courts in this case.

Elsewhere on the web, Michelle Malkin does a tremendous job of annhilating the bogus ABC poll of last week which showed 63% of people supporting the removal of Terri's feeding tube, and 70% opposing congressional intervention. If those numbers seemed a little lopsided, Malkin says it's for a reason:

Here is how the spinmasters framed the main poll question:

As you may know, a woman in Florida named Terri Schiavo suffered brain damage and has been on life support for 15 years. Doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. Her parents and her husband disagree on whether or not she should be kept on life support. In cases like this who do you think should have final say, (the parents) or (the spouse)?

A follow-up question asked:

If you were in this condition, would you want to be kept alive, or not?

The problem is that, contrary to what ABC News told those polled, Terri Schiavo is not on "life support" and has never been on "life support." The loaded phrase evokes images of a comatose patient being artificially sustained by myriad machines and pumps and wires. Terri was on a feeding tube. A feeding tube is not a ventilator. Terri can breathe just fine on her own.

Among other excellent recent things on the case:

Charles Krauthammer (himself an M.D.) says in the Washinton Post that medical assurances that Terri has no conscioiusness are nonsense.

National Review Online features an essential Q&A with Princeton's Robert George.

And Kathleen Parker asks the question "When is a husband not a husband?" Echoing the thoughts of my good friend Brad in California who asked me this question the other day and got me thinking, Parker points out that "the fact that Schiavo's fate has rested in the hands of a man who is her husband in title only is both mystifying and maddening."