Schiavo issue haunts Crist

St. Petersburg Times ^ | November 1, 2006 | ADAM C. SMITH

[8mmMauser]

Republican gubernatorial front-runner Charlie Crist says he was perfectly clear in opposing governmental intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.

He spoke out loudly.

And he was silent.

Loudly silent.

The day after limping through a tough nationally televised debate, the Republican attorney general wanted to talk about his plans to slash taxes. Instead reporters questioned him about his debate assertion that, “Yes, I did’’ speak out against Congress trying to force the reinsertion of the severely brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in 2005.

Crist did not publicly express his opposition to the Schiavo intervention until April 2006, more than a year after the Pinellas woman’s death. But he maintained on Tuesday that he forcefully expressed his opposition from the start.

“I spoke loudly,” Crist said in Tallahassee. “I think it’s important that when issues like that come up and you believe that government is the appropriate place for it that you act that out, and you walk the walk, and don’t just talk the talk.’’

The attorney general noted that his office “by not going to court and pushing the agenda on that issue, that was speaking out louder than anybody else did in Florida.”

This is one of many issues — from insurance reform to abortion and civil unions — where Crist has been accused of ambiguity or trying please all sides.

Contrary to his comments Tuesday, during the Republican gubernatorial primary in August he stressed to the weekly newspaper of the Florida Baptist Convention that his office helped the governor’s office with legal work to keep Schiavo alive, even though he personally had qualms.

“I don’t remember that, but I’ll check on it and see,” Crist said when asked about that interview with the Florida Baptist Witness.

Gov. Jeb Bush came to his would-be successor’s defense. “He spoke out to me,” Bush told reporters. Crist, however, said he never directly talked to Bush.

There are few issues in the political realm so black and white as the Terri Schiavo case. People either supported the state and federal government intervening to keep her alive or they didn’t.

But Crist is the second statewide candidate recently to face questions about how he acted during the Schiavo end-of-life controversies that erupted in 2003 in the Legislature and in 2005 in both the Legislature and Congress.

Democratic Attorney General candidate Walter “Skip” Campbell, a state senator from Broward County, has been on the defensive this week for having voted to keep Schiavo alive and later criticizing the governmental intervention. Crist’s involvement in the Schiavo case may be the only common ground between the Schindler family, Terri

Schiavo’s parents and siblings who fought to keep her alive, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, who insisted his wife did not want to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Both sides have criticized Crist.

“When he said in that debate that he’s going to be a leader, my heart dropped. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower,’’ Michael Schiavo said Tuesday. “If he really wanted to stand up he would have said, 'No, this is wrong. The government should stay out of this.’ ... Charlie Crist did not say a word, he was nowhere to be found. He’s a coward.’’

Terri Schiavo’s father, Bob Schindler, wrote an essay in August accusing Crist of snubbing the family’s pleas for him to help their efforts. “Florida Atty. Gen. Charlie Crist let my daughter die. He had it within his authority to save her life, but he turned a blind eye to her suffering,’’ Schindler wrote.

The Florida Democratic Party issued a release saying Crist “lied” about his role in the Schiavo case, but at a brief campaign stop at Arco-Iris restaurant in Tampa on Tuesday, Davis would only say that Crist “misrepresented his position.”

“I was up fighting George Bush and the entire United States Congress, both political parties, and Charlie Crist was unwilling to take a position,” Davis said.

Davis, trailing in polls and campaign money, is hoping his debate performance Monday night will cut Crist’s advantages. No statewide viewership numbers were available Tuesday, but in the Tampa Bay area about 152,000 households tuned in — a ratings jump for that time slot on WFLA — and that doesn’t include those who watched on MSNBC.

- Tallahassee bureau chief Steve Bousquet and staff writer Alex Leary contributed to this report. Adam C. Smith can be reached at asmith@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8241.\

[Uncle Billy]

oh yeah, forget limited government. let's just use congress as our own little political tool whenever we see fit. what a joke. barry goldwater pukes on all of this pandering crap.

if the republicans in florida wanted to save her so bad, all they had to do was pass a law requiring the decision to turn off the machines to be in writing. the legislature met on that issue while this was pending and DIDN'T PASS THE CHANGE. why? because it would have cost florida tens of billions of dollars in caring for old people on life support w/o written wills. so blame the florida state legislature. stop sacrificing conservative principles.

[T'wit]

>> Poster boy for gluttony and greed, Senator Jim King

The man is so close to heart attack, stroke, diabetes and STDs, you'd think he'd have second thoughts about his "legacy" legislation to snuff seniors and embezzle their estates. He himself is on the short list for snuffing now.

[T'wit]

Sorry, but NCG has asked us not to post its material. We have been honoring that request.

[T'wit]

The good doctor starts his recap of the case thus... >> In the early morning of Feb. 25, 1990, Terri Schiavo collapsed...

Whoa, doc. We don't know that. There is no indication or medical finding that she DID "collapse" (at least insofar as the word implies some natural cause).

The question is, how did a healthy young woman, almost surely asleep, end up face down on the hallway floor, in cardiac arrest and near death, shortly after her husband came home late from work one Saturday night? (And why did the husband tell three or four different stories about what happened?)

How did a woman who'd been asleep suddenly show up with lactic acidosis and acute (2.0) hypokalemia in her blood tests by the time she reached the ER?

A bone scan thirteen months later was positive for "trauma," and showed (among other things) a fractured spine at L1 and a nasty bone bruise on the right femur. We could explain the injuries by a car wreck (she wasn't in one) or a beating, but not by bulimia.

This case is not about Living Wills, doc.

[bjs1779]

I would just ask for permission first. The last time I did something similar, I double checked with NCG and I was within their rules.

[T'wit]

We still hear from people who agree with George Felos, Michael Schiavo and the late Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond on the subject of States' Rights. Presumably they agree with the Dred Scott decision too. Here are a few words Ann Coulter had for the "no intervention" view. She wrote this as Terri lay dying twenty months ago.

>> You can't grow peanuts on your own land or install a toilet capable of disposing two tissues in one flush because of federal government intervention. But Congress demands a review of the process that goes into a governmental determination to kill an innocent American woman -- and that goes too far!

>> It's not a radical extension of current constitutional doctrines -- even the legitimate ones! -- for the federal government to assert a constitutional right to life that cannot be denied without due process of law under the Fifth and 14th Amendments. Congress didn't ask for much, just the same due process John Wayne Gacy got.

But people even stupider than lawyers have picked up on the vague rumblings from "most consistent constitutionalist" aspirants and begun to claim that Congress' action is an affront to "limited government."

[bjs1779]

It would be a privilege to snuggle up with Ann sometime to pick her brain. : )

[T'wit]

Further to the intervention question.

The Terri Schiavo story started on February 25, 1990. (We really should start it on the 24th because Terri and Michael had a terrible fight about her spending $80 to get her hair colored -- a fight that may well have cost her her life that night.) Her story and her life reached a sad end with her death on March 31, 2005. That is fifteen years and five weeks later.

52 weeks times 15.1 years = approximately 785 weeks for the whole story to play out. Congress authorized the federal courts to review the case de novo about one week before Terri died. So, timewise, Congress became involved when the story was 99.87% over.

Congress's 1/8 of 1% involvement, we should further note, had 0.00% effect on the case. None. Zip. It did not delay Terri's death by one minute. The courts spent a couple of days refusing to review, and that was that. Then everyone watched the court-ordered execution of an innocent American citizen come to its grisly conclusion.

The "invervention" argument is so much fog. The real question arose fifteen years earlier. How did a healthy young woman, asleep in bed, suddenly end up on the hallway floor, face down, in cardiac arrest and near death, shortly after her husband came home from his late hours job that Saturday night? There is only one witness and he doesn't have an alibi.

[T'wit]

>> It would be a privilege to snuggle up with Ann sometime to pick her brain. : )

Yes, her intellect is absolutely lovely :-)

[T'wit]

It's her publication. Presumably she writes for her paying customers. If she can support herself doing so, more power to her and to her subscribers.

[T'wit]

>> I would just ask for permission first.

No harm with that! One can always ask. I was simply reminding the forum that she asked us not to excerpt or link NCG material. NCG to some extent provides her livelihood and she has every right to keep her material proprietary.

[bjs1779]

When the mission is big, always support our friends.

[bjs1779]

Yes, but it would clear everything up if permission was just kindly asked. To me, that is a valuable source of information to automatically ignore.

[T'wit]

>> When the mission is big, always support our friends.

That has always been my personal policy. In this case, it's not my call. It's up to the friend. She takes a different view and that's her option.

[bjs1779]

That has always been my personal policy. In this case, it's not my call. It's up to the friend. She takes a different view and that's her option.

If you see something there that you might want to link, why don't you just ask her? Why is this so hard?

[T'wit]

>> To me, that is a valuable source of information to automatically ignore.

We are required to "ignore" it for this forum, per JM's expressed wish. That does not mean that Freepers cannot subscribe to NCG on their own.

I like our own work here. It has been fertile.

[bjs1779]

We are required to "ignore" it for this forum, per JM's expressed wish. That does not mean that Freepers cannot subscribe to NCG on their own.

If you ask JM if you can post a linked story, all she can do is to say yes or no. In my experience, she always said yes.

[bjs1779]

Yes, her intellect is absolutely lovely :-)

I would never take advantage of her btw!

[8mmMauser]

This comes from AMedNews and forms a topic of discussion related to the T'wit post above by Ann Coulter #746.

Interesting questions, curious about the answers they concluded.

Las Vegas -- In March 2005, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD, viewed an hour-long videotape of Terri Schiavo and questioned whether the Florida woman at the center of a national debate about end-of-life care was in a persistent vegetative state.

"She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli," the Tennessee Republican and cardiovascular surgeon said on the Senate floor. Was Dr. Frist wrong to make such a statement?

When Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher, MD, signed a death warrant for a convicted murderer, did he violate ethical policies that say physicians should not participate in executions? What duties do physicians have to uphold medical ethics when serving in nonphysician roles?

Ethics forum considers duty of physicians in public positions... Delegates also discussed ethical considerations surrounding sedating terminally ill patients.

8mm