Rush Limbaugh and several other conservative talk show hosts are speaking out against the "pseudo-conservatives" like you and me who are obviously misguided and uninformed with respect to the Terri Schaivo case and the congressional action recently taken to allow her parents to use the federal courts in an effort to have her feeding tube reinserted. Rush calmly explained the constitutional basis, as he sees it, for congressional action and supposed that would-be conservatives who felt either that Schaivo's should not have the tube reinserted or who felt congress had overstepped a boundary are namby pamby pseudo-conservatives. Rush went so far as to claim these folks are trying to prove to some unseen liberal audience that they are enlightened or compassionate or sophisticated.

Well, I am a conservative who doesn't give a rat's ass what any liberal morons think of me or my intellect. I am neither afraid of my convictions nor trying to appear enlightened. The way I see things is:

1) A person should have the right to do with themselves what they want provided that they do not infringe upon another person's rights. This excludes abortion as that necessarily involves another person's life. But it does include not wanting any of the ever-increasing aray of medical keep alive technology we see. When it is only a small matter of time, when there is no hope of recovery, I want my body to decide when I die, not some medical board, not the courts, and certainly not congress.

2) When a man leaves his family, a woman leaves hers, and the two are joined together as one, they begin life as a new family. The previous family no longer has a claim to either as a part of their family in the sense that Terri's parents and siblings claim to in this case. I tell my wife more about myself, my wishes, my desires, than I have ever told my many siblings and parents collectively. They cannot represent me in the same sense that my wife represents me. She knows what I want. They do not.

3) If I should find myself in a similar circumstance as Terri, I would not want a feeding tube to sustain the life of my body. I have told my wife this in no uncertain terms. Should I be in that position and somehow parties step in to force a feeding tube, I have asked my wife for her solemn vow to end my life via whatever means available including an overdose of insulin or any other available drug. This is the supposed crime Mr. Schaivo committed but has not been acted upon by any law enforcement agency. He is the kind of monster I would want my wife to be.

4) I will have a living will to prevent the sort of nonsense that has occurred in the Schaivo case. But if I should be struck down this moment before I put pen to paper, I would hope to God that my wife be allowed to do the right thing and no relative nor medical board take an opposing point of view and push me into the national media spotlight.

5) Congress can do virtually anything imaginable in the name of protecting the constitutional rights of any individual. It is merely limited by an analyst's ability to frame the right argument. That is the principal reason we have courts. Courts primary responsibility is to see that laws, including the constitution, are followed through upon. To simply state that congress has the constitutional right to enact any law in order to protect the rights of one individual, is precisely the same didactic used by the left many times to justify such ludicrous proposals as welfare or universal health insurance coverage. This is a sophistry heretofore reserved for the left. Let's leave it on the left.


I want the government out of my life to the greatest extent possible. I want government to be limited to protecting these United States from enemies within and without but I want them making decisions against the husband in favor of the siblings and parents about as much as I want them financing abortion on demand! I don't want the government telling me to buckle up or it is gonna cost you or that my 10 years old needs to be propped up in a car booster seat. Hell, if you can't keep my water and air clean, what gives you the high ground to dictate whether I wear a seatbelt or when I should be allowed to die. Government has demonstrated that it is incapable of discerning when to do what most of the time. As such, we formed this government to be as small as possible and as unobtrusive as possible. That is what the conservatives used to stand for before they began ballooning up spending and governmental deficits. I understand the need to wage war in Iraq. I understand that national defense costs money. But these guys cannot do their job well. They certainly cannot determine when Terri Schaivo has no potential to recover from being a ragdoll that seems to smile as a result of unknown stimuli or whose eyes involuntarily follow environmental changes in light as when her mother puts her face in front of Terri. Government needs to butt out of this case. But it is too late for that,

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others, please get off your high horse and if you won't listen to us, listen to yourself, then listen to the lib.s, then listen to yourself again, and so on. You are beginning to sound like the left with different words stuffed in the fill the blanks spots of your pre-written script. It is tedious at best and disingenuous at worst.

We are not "siding with the lib.s." We are not trying to sound sophisticated. We are speaking our hearts and minds. You ought to at least listen since we are aligned with you.