Fear & Loathing on the Editorial Page

I didn't want to. I knew it would upset me. But I clicked on "The Schindler's Train" nonetheless, and read what the LATimes editorial board thought was the best way to sum up the Terri Schiavo tragedy.

To the LAT, it appears to all be about exploitation for a reason they don't quite understand:

We don't question their love for their daughter and their grief at her passing, but one has to wonder why they allowed everyone from Randall Terry to Tom DeLay to Jesse Jackson to intrude into their family's tragedy.

Maybe it's really all about the Schindler's greed:

In the last few days, the Schindlers also agreed to allow some of their dubious allies to cash in on their daughter's brain damage. The Schindlers agreed to allow a conservative direct-marketing firm to sell lists of those who had sent them money.

The motivation that seems to mystify and elude the LAT editorialists is simple: Love. Life. Protection. Understanding. Caring. Faith. Are they not reading the same newspapers I'm reading? Can't they see there was at least some question of Terri's physical condition and Michael's spiritual condition they should question?

What makes their allies dubious, exactly? Do they really think Tom DeLay sees this as an opportunity to have a theocratic coup? If they do, they didn't bother to read the highly restricted legislation Congress passed. Is it political position that makes them dubious? Then how can they group Terry, DeLay and Jackson in the same group? Is it greed or lust for power? The greedy and the power-hungry don't usually jump in front of a high-speed locomotive that's been barreling down the wrong track for a decade.

And are they dubious because those who supported Terri attempted to use government to act out their will? That can't be, because Michael Schiavo has been doing just that for years. Except he selected the Lib's favorite branch, the judiciary, instead of the people's branch, the legislative.

No, in the LAT's eyes, those who stood by Terri are dubious because they have faith, because they are conservative, because they will stand in the way when the courts try to kill a person under questionable circumstances.

The editorial concludes:

Terri Schiavo could not have been aware of the uses made of her image while she was alive. But with her death, those video snippets of a lipsticked mouth and eyes seeming to gaze upward will still be raising money for someone.

What hypocrisy! The Left exploits the dead endlessly in their fundraising effort. Sometimes it's their fallen heroes, like Guevera, Silkwood and the Kent State kids. And worse, sometimes they exploit our fallen heroes. They raise money over the bodies of dead policemen to free some ruthless murderer from the death penalty. They put our young recruits on magazine covers to make money off sales, never noting that the soldiers on the cover are not the deserters they're writing about.

And, they will use Terri Schiavo for years to raise money to keep their activist courts and ghoulish "public interest" law firms in business.