No rest in peace: A year ago today, Terri Schiavo shuffled off her mortal coil, ending a two-decades-long family saga that managed by turns to be tragic and ludicrous. There are two books out about the case, one by Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, and a competing one by the Schindler family. Now, a year after she died peacefully, blissfully unaware of the personal and political forces her persistent vegetative state had inspired, Florida conservatives are exhuming her for their political ends.

I received today a “Conservative Alert” (co-editor Trish does not understand how or why I subject myself to this stuff, but it helps to know one’s enemy, not to mention it provides content for the Review) from wingnuts William Greene and Randall Terry.

The letter begins this way:

It is hard to believe that today — March 31 — marks the one-year anniversary of Terri Schiavo’s brutal death by starvation. I’m still grieving over the fact that our elected officials allowed a tin pot dictator judge to starve an innocent woman to death.

Greene, who wrote the first letter, goes on the mention Terri’s “public execution” and her “struggle for life” as a way to introduce Randall Terry’s campaign for Florida Senate against the evil Jim King. According to Greene:

Senator King callously said, “I want her to die.” Senator King made it his personal mission to ensure that she was starved to death, and successfully recruited eight other Republican senators in his mission. If we had had just three of their votes, she would still be alive!

Then Randall Terry gets wound up in a letter that has no less than four — count ’em — four links to donate to his campaign:

Please understand this — the vast majority of the voters in the upcoming election were ardent supporters of Terri Schiavo’s right to life! Moreover, the vast majority of the voters in this district support the right to life of the unborn. My opponent, Jim King, is an ardent supporter of abortion on demand as well as the chief voice for Terri’s starvation.

I, on the other hand, am a strong supporter of the right to life.

And to add insult to injury — he supports a number of left-wing causes such as special rights for homosexuals, including the right for openly homosexual couples to adopt children!

And as if that is not enough — he is now under an ethics investigation for an illegal private plane ride to a major gambling casino in Canada. He is mired in scandal, and saddled with the burden of a record in the Senate that is against the values of the majority of the voters.

By giving Terry money, he says, you will be saying to the world, “We support the right to life! And that includes the right of all handicapped and severely injured people to live without fear of starvation!”

It was bad enough when the Florida legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush started passing laws to prolong Schiavo’s vegetative state, but then Senate Majority Leader and physician Bill Frist started diagnosing from the podium and George Bush came out of vacation to chime in to try and save the brain-dead woman. But for Greene and Terry to raise the dead in support of a hyper-conservative agenda is just, well, I suppose it’s just par for the course in a case that seems not to have a lowest point.

R.I.P. Terri Schiavo, if they’ll only let you.

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