I’ve been offline and/or traveling for most of the weekend, so I haven’t weighed in on the shameless exploitation of the Schaivo case by Congressional Republicans. But to make an obvious point, it is indeed shameless.
Maybe the most ridiculous aspect of the whole charade has been people pretending to diagnose Schiavo from afar. Here’s Amy Sullivan laying the beatdown on Bill Frist at WashingtonMonthly.com for abusing his medical authority:
STOP THIS MAN BEFORE HE DIAGNOSES AGAIN….I wasn’t going to comment on the Terry Schiavo case, mostly because it seems that any attention just feeds directly into what conservatives are hoping to achieve: a trumped-up culture war. (See Ed Kilgore’s comments for my general take on the issue.) But Senator Frist’s recent diagnosis—via a home-made video, it’s important to note–that Schiavo is not actually in a persistent vegetative state, compels me to write…
[W]hat’s really appalling about Frist’s latest I’m-not-a-neurologist-but-I-play-one-in-the-Senate routine is that he does this all the time. For at least eight years, Frist has been making medical pronouncements on all manner of medical issues outside his speciality (he’s a heart surgeon), and his message is always the same: You can’t trust all those other doctors, but you can trust me because I am a doctor.
Last December, when asked by George Stephanopoulos whether HIV could be transmitted through saliva or tears, Frist refused to say that it could not, stalling three times before finally admitting, “It would be very hard.” That’s putting it mildly. In October 2001, after a letter containing anthrax was sent to Senator Daschle’s office, Frist assured his fellow senators that the anthrax wasn’t powerful enough to kill anyone, even though several people had already died in Florida and postal workers who handled the letter in D.C. subsequently died. And in 1997, when the Senate was debating the “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban,” Frist claimed on the Senate floor that D&X, the abortion procedure they sought to ban, was a “rogue procedure” that was not taught in medical schools, a claim that would come as a surprise to many teaching hospitals.
Frist is a doctor, yes. But he is not a neurologist, he is not an infectious disease specialist, he is not a biological agent expert, and he is not an obstetrician. He uses his “Dr.” title as a smokescreen to make politically-motivated pronouncements. The only reason he gets away with it is that people are intimidated by his certainty, reminded (because he repeats it all the time) that he is the Senate’s only physician.
Except he’s not. Now that Tom Coburn is the junior senator from Oklahoma, Frist is merely the Senate’s only not insane physician. Who are you or I to question his medical judgment? When it comes to diagnosing neurological function on the basis of watching a home video for an hour, you and I are just about as qualified as Frist.
Update 3/21: Good news! The public isn’t buying it at all. See this ABC News poll, which shows overwhelming majorities opposed to Congress getting involved to keep Schiavo alive (via Think Progress and Kevin Drum).
Update 3/21: The national media has noticed that Bush signed a law in Texas that is blatantly inconsistent with his stand on Schiavo. (Bonus highlight if you read the story: Scott McClellan denying this obvious fact.) Also, don’t miss Dahlia Lithwick’s devastating article about the GOP intervention into the case on Slate.
Update 3/22: The Note claims that the law isn’t inconsistent with Bush’s stand on Schiavo because it offered increased protection compared with previous law. Well, so what? It still would have allowed Schiavo to be unplugged. I’m unconvinced.
Correction 3/23: The New York Times completely botched the second quote above, which according to a correction published today was (a) incorrectly attributed to Bill Kristol and (b) omitted the part where the speaker, Fred Barnes, attributed his views to a neurologist who spoke wtih Frist. As such, I’ve deleted the paragraph referring to Kristol and taken him out of the headline. Apologies for the error.
Update 3/23: See also the Washington Post’s article on Frist’s boundary-crossing.