Reality and reason on life support

When can we pull his feeding tube?

"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America," the Texan congressman told a meeting of the Family Research Council.

Dismissing medical findings that Schiavo is in a "persistent vegetative state," he declared outrage that "Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is lucid and starve them to death for two weeks."

Insanity. Sheer, wearisome insanity. Even George W. Bush sees the writing on the wall on this one, and has gone back to whipping up fears of cat food and a life of working as a Wal*Mart greeter for the rest of your retired years.

The Schiavo case is just the latest and most extreme example of how the rules of debate have -- not just shifted -- they've gone right over the top, and you can hear the screetch of reason's metal skidding across the road and into the ditch. "Intelligent Design," Holocaust denial, Social Security "crisis," the list goes on. Instead of debate, we get lunacy to which, if we don't argue against, we're seen as acquiescing. But if we do argue against it, we've effectively given legitimacy to a position that has absolutely no basis in reality.

Yesterday, in an affidavit supporting a petition by the Florida Department of Children and Families in the case, Dr. Cheshire said it was more likely that Ms. Schiavo was in a "minimally conscious state."

"Although Terri did not demonstrate during our 90-minute visit compelling evidence of verbalization, conscious awareness or volitional behavior," he wrote, "yet the visitor has the distinct sense of the presence of a living human being who seems at some level to be aware of some things around her."

Mr. Bush called Dr. Cheshire a "renowned neurologist," but he is not widely known in the neurology or bioethics fields. Asked about him, Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, replied, "Who?"

Dr. Cheshire, who graduated from Princeton and earned a medical degree at West Virginia University, did not return calls to the Mayo Clinic seeking comment. The clinic said in a statement that his work on the Schiavo case was not related to his work at the clinic and that the state had invited his opinion. "He observed the patient at her bedside and conducted an extensive review of her medical history but did not conduct an examination," the statement said.

Dr. Caplan said that was not good enough. "There is just no excuse for going in and making any pronouncement about the state that Terri Schiavo is in unless you're going to go in and do some form of technologically mediated scanning that would overturn what's on the record already," he said.

Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Ms. Schiavo on behalf of the Florida courts and declared her to be irredeemably brain-damaged, said, "I have no idea who this Cheshire is," and added: "He has to be bogus, a pro-life fanatic. You'll not find any credible neurologist or neurosurgeon to get involved at this point and say she's not vegetative."

He said there was no doubt that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. "Her CAT scan shows massive shrinkage of the brain," he said. "Her EEG is flat - flat. There's no electrical activity coming from her brain."

[Breaking news. Can this really be the end of this entire ordeal? Or will the same Supreme Court that put a Bush in the White House (no jokes about persistent vegetative states, ok), now be accused of being a bunch of "activist judges?"]

The description of Publius's blog, which, sadly, he's shutting down for now, says it best:

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over." Thomas Jefferson, 1798

I, for one, am running a little short on patience lately.