Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Congress to the rescue . . .

I've been thinking about Teri Schaivo today, because starving to death is a tough way to go. I know she is in a "vegetative" state (there's a repulsive metaphor). But even so, she is a human being in such a state, and as such, she is still an extremely complex individual, and probably feels things. It's not as if she is some simple organism without much of a nervous system. (Go ahead. Squish it, man. Bugs don't feel nuthin'.) For heavens sake, if you want her to die, find some vet to calculate the juice to inject to just put her down without the possibility of pain.

If you have the nerve.

But mostly I'm thinking that I don't know what to think about the Teri Schaivo matter. It's possible that her husband is fighting a desperate and noble battle to give his wife the one thing left he can give her -- her wish not to live this way. It's also just as possible that her husband is using the law to kill his wife legally after having scored a big judgment based on the necessity of caring for her economically for the rest of her life. And it's possible that her parents are tirelessly trying to preserve for their daughter the possiblity that with care and time, she can return to a full life. And it is just as possible that they are sentimentally and foolishly preserving the husk of their dead daughter long beyond the point at which it would have spoiled but for medical science. Any of those could be true, or false. So I don't know what to think about her family and husband.

But I know exactly what to think about the United States Congress. Those bozos jumped on a current issue that did not concern them under the U.S. Constitution and created a federal court jurisdictional basis for the parents to bring their case to federal court, where there wasn't one before. And they did it, as far as I can tell, without providing a clear cause of action on which to base the case.

Did you ever notice how, whenever a television camera is set up on the street to video a scene or an interview, some juvenile or some adult with a case of arrested maturity will come into view and stick his goofy face sideways into the camera's field of vision? And grin and say woo? Just to interrupt and call the attention to himself? And pretty much to annoy the real adults? Well, my question is, why do we elect clowns such as these to Congress?

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