The American Spectator

Media Matters

Former Massachusetts congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who supported legalizing abortion when he served in Congress, still uses the authority of his collar to cheerlead for evil causes. On Easter Sunday, he turned up at various television studios to praise the starvation to death of Terri Schiavo. Drinan was apparently Tim Russert's idea of a sturdy Catholic authority on this matter. Even as Drinan praised the killing of a disabled woman he mused nostalgically about passage of the "Americans with Disabilities Act," a glorious piece of legislation, he said. A host not willing to play the stooge to a snow-job artist might have asked Drinan: So why doesn't the ADA prevent murdering a disabled woman like Terri Schiavo? Why does the ADA give the disabled ramps at restaurants but permit trapdoors at hospitals?

Warming to the old Democratic creed, Drinan also spoke of the need for gun control. "Why don't we ban guns?" he said at one point. This from a proponent of legalized violence at the beginning and end of life. If Michael Schiavo took out one of the guns that Drinan wants banned and shot his wife to death, how would that be morally different from the methods of starvation and dehydration?

The media's instinctual use of "authorities" who are frauds -- the Drinans who clog their rolodexes (priests appear on television in proportion to their willingness to upend Catholic teachings) -- was just the tip of the iceberg during a weekend of torrential bias. Whenever a cultural controversy pops up, the bias that mainstream reporters furiously deny comes rushing back. Reporters and commentators were thrilled with the chance to try and nail Republicans for "overreach." To embarrass the Republicans and ensure that everyone would feel good about killing Schiavo, the media dug down into their bag of malicious tricks, using tendentious polling, a smear job against Tom DeLay, reports of faux-concern about conservative division (worrying about a cohesive Republican Party is of course foremost in their minds), and flat-out Orwellian propaganda to confuse the matter as much as possible.

The reliance on euphemism was almost nonstop. Much of the coverage was cast in the passive terms of not "prolonging" a life rather than starving a woman to death. The journalists rooting for her death didn't quite have the courage of their convictions. They didn't want to call murder by its proper name, so they searched out softer names for it. Lest anyone figure out that the humanism of liberalism is essentially Hitlerite -- think about how often killing people deemed undesirables is the final solution in liberal schemes of human improvement -- specificity had to be avoided at all costs.

Just as reporters are more comfortable calling soon-to-be-killed human fetuses "blastocysts," so they prefer calling a disabled human like Schiavo a "vegetable." Reporters helped launch the abortion movement with euphemisms denying the humanity of children, now they help the euthanasia movement pick up speed with euphemisms denying the humanity of the disabled and the elderly.

"Consent" was perhaps the liberal media's favorite big lie over the weekend. This won't lead to killing the disabled and elderly unless they consent, went the lie. Anybody who believes this should count up the number of unborn children who have been aborted without their consent. Those saying, "This is what Terri wanted," are obviously saying, "This is what we want for her." Juan Williams on Fox, hot under the collar after panelists questioned his essential let's-kill-the-disabled position, fell back on the consent sophistry: I don't recall him ever worrying about the lack of consent in the million-plus abortions each year. It is a little late in the game for liberals to say that they are opposed to killing without consent

On PBS Bonnie Erbe, who is one liberal willing to be openly crass, bluntly asked her panelists why people with a low "quality of life" should continue to drain public health resources. Erbe's question will become commonplace. Under liberalism in America "the right to die" will rapidly become a duty to die: for the sake of liberal utopia, the disabled and elderly will be pressured into becoming accomplices to their own murders. Let the disabled bury the disabled. Life is for the living. That's the spirit of liberalism at this point.

Euthanasia has never been about ending the burdens of the ill but about ending the burdens of the living who don't want to care for the ill. It is not about "letting die" -- the media's dishonest description of what's happening to Schiavo -- but about killing someone who isn't dying but people wish would die.

The infantile gotcha journalism against Tom DeLay in the Los Angeles Times -- apparently editor John Carroll's rebuking memo to reporters about their penchant for biased coverage on social issues has been gathering some dust -- was designed to sow confusion on this point. Tom DeLay's father was in the act of dying after a freak accident, and the DeLay family let him die. The Times compares this to starving a woman to death. If Terri Schiavo were in the act of dying, she would have died. It is precisely because she wasn't in the act of dying that her husband resorted to having her killed by starvation.

The Times' casuistry is as despicable as Robert Drinan's.

topics:
Television, Abortion