Schiavo case not about facts

By Marie Cocco
Columnist
6/24/05
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WASHINGTON - It won't end with the autopsy.

The postmortem examination of Terri Schiavo provided medical facts that resolve any doubt about the condition the brain-damaged woman was in before her husband, Michael, at last succeeded in withdrawing her feeding tube last March. Schiavo's brain was half the normal size. She was blind. No treatment could have brought improvement.

For most of us, the facts are enough to end discussion of the case that seized the television screens and the attention of Congress during the Easter season. But it will not end. Because the Schiavo imbroglio was never about the facts.

It may have been about faith. It may have been about the bitterness that Schiavo's parents feel toward their son-in-law. It may have been about the political ambitions of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - he has demanded that a prosecutor investigate the circumstances of Schiavo's collapse in 1990 - or about the political goals of other Republican lawmakers, including the president.

"Would I do it over again? Yes, I would do it over again," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told reporters who pressed him about his own conduct during the Schiavo episode. Frist, a heart surgeon, took to the Senate floor and referred to his own medical credentials when he declared that the oft-seen videotape of Schiavo in her hospice bed did not seem to show someone in a persistent vegetative state and what's more, demonstrated that "she certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."

And yes, he says proudly, he would do it again. We must expect that something akin to the Schiavo spectacle will recur because of the world in which we now live.

It is a world in which objective fact no longer is the basis for how we are governed. A world in which distortions and untruths are repeated, over and over again, until just enough Americans believe them to provide a veneer of approval for the outlandish.

The subversion of science by the Bush administration is well known. Its officials have changed health Web sites to distort information on the effectiveness of condoms in preventing AIDS and to claim a nonexistent link between breast cancer and abortion. They have blocked approval of emergency contraception - taken immediately after sex and before anyone has an inkling of whether fertilization has occurred - because they consider the pill to cause abortion.

Reproductive health isn't the only casualty. Everyone's health is. Distorted claims and suppression of facts also have marked the administration's approach to global warming, to mercury pollution and air pollution, to workplace safety and lead poisoning.

Don't care about science? Then war is another example.

There were false claims that Saddam Hussein held massive stockpiles of unconventional weapons. The claims continued even after international inspectors had asserted that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program. The drumbeat went on even after inspectors led by the U.N.'s Hans Blix were readmitted to Iraq and kept turning up nothing.

There is the phantom link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. It has been disproved by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies, as well as the 9/11 commission. Yet President Bush continues to weave a connection. As recently as Saturday, the president declared in his radio address: "We went to war because we were attacked." Noting that "some" disagreed with his decision to remove Saddam from power, the president went on to say that "terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror."

The circularity is perfect. With the breakdown of order in Iraq having created a haven for terrorists, and with the invasion by a Western superpower providing the ideological impetus for jihadists, the president now declares Iraq to be a "central front in the war on terror." But he'd also claimed it was a terrorist threat before we invaded.

What becomes of a nation that allows itself to be guided by fiction and not fact? Do our leaders - educated and experienced as most of them are - believe their own rhetoric? Are they so driven by ambition or, alternately for Democrats, cowed in their opposition, that they have become dangerously deluded?

Most lawmakers do not inhabit some imaginary universe where black is white and up is down. They know reality from fantasy. The sorry case of Terri Schiavo, and so much else that has transpired these past few years, should send them a message they simply must heed if we are ever to get back on track: Get a grip.