Eros Colored Glasses

Values Voter Summit 2006: The Final Battle

2006-10-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD & Steven Eros

If last week's 2006 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. demonstrated anything it was that America's conservative churches are fighting a moral War on Error every bit as threatening as America's War on Terror.

Over 1700 mostly conservative religious activists attended the conference in Washington, DC aimed at politically equipping and rallying religious leaders and strategists in the run-up to the 2006 midterm elections. Plenary sessions were all "Standing Room Only."

Leading conservative prospects for the 2008 presidential race auditioned, including Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.), Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. George Allen (Va.), and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Notably, two other leading contenders, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani did not participate.

Conference organizers included Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association.

What's at Stake

Organizers convened the 2006 Values Voter Summit to prepare conservative religious leaders and activists nationwide for what may be the most challenging and destiny-determining political battle of their lives. Above all, the 2006 midterm elections offer this generation what may be its last chance to see a Republican president appoint a fifth, and deciding, solidly conservative justice to the United States Supreme Court.

Such an appointment, along with continued Republican congressional dominance, would almost certainly determine the final outcome of the generations-long battle over the most important moral issues of our time. The list of issues includes: gay marriage amendments on both the state and federal level; sanctity of life concerns ranging from abortion-on-demand to partial birth abortion to human embryo harvesting to end-of-life issues such as those raised by the Terri Schiavo case; moral standards in Hollywood and the classroom; cutting taxes, eliminating the marriage penalty and the death tax, and restraining government spending; threats to religious freedom, banned prayer in the schools, and implementation of faith-based initiatives as alternatives to government programs; strong national defense, aggressively restricting illegal immigration, and vigorously opposing the threat of ascendant Islamic fascism.

Within reach is an extraordinary alignment of conservative dominance in all three branches of government. Appointment of a fifth conservative Supreme Court justice would extend the hope of reversing a decades-long moral decline in a single breathtaking sweep. Conservatives realize that if Democrats win a majority in the Senate, then any hope of a conservative victory in these moral conflicts may be lost for at least a generation.

Dobson: Energized

As Dr. Dobson openly confessed, Christian values voters have been disappointed at the congressional failure to enact legislation on their issues over the last two years despite electing a Republican House, Senate, and President in 2004. Values voters were crucial to Republican victories in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections. Around election time in 2004, The Weekly Standard reported on several polls indicating that issues such as gay marriage and abortion were vote-determining to 15 to 18 per cent of voters. These polls showed Bush carrying values voters by an overwhelming 70-18 margin.

By his own account, Dobson began the year 2006 "extremely disappointed," and dispirited. He even considered withdrawing from his "exhausting" practice of pre-election "crisscrossing the country trying to get people to turn out, because turnout is everything."

Recently, though, the Republican-led congress has turned around. Now Dobson says he is "absolutely convinced there is no choice" but to be as active as possible "because the alternative is terrible." He continued, "People must turn out."

Of President Bush, Dobson had this to say: "I'm telling you, he is the most pro-life president we've ever had. And when it comes to the War on Terrorism, he gets it." Appalled by the congressional passivity in the wake of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's U.N. speech denouncing Bush as the "devil" incarnate and threatening to bring down America, Dobson castigated congress for its "pantywaist" response. "I'm ticked," he said.

Asked by a reporter to explain why he was so disappointed in the lack of reaction to Chavez's attacks, Dobson remarked, "I consider the comments by Hugo Chavez to be one of the most outrageous assaults on the respect and integrity of this nation that I've ever heard. In fact, I don't believe that, in history, anyone has been that disrespectful to a president of the United States. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican is irrelevant. This country has been assaulted and threatened by this man."

Education, Art and Culture: Turning the Demographic Tide

On the minds of many conference participants is the fact that, given current demographic trends, the remaining years of George W. Bush's term may provide the last opportunity to appoint a fifth, and deciding, socially conservative justice. That is possible only if Republicans retain the Senate.

Earlier this year, a Pew Research poll found opposition to legalizing same-sex marriage has declined from 63 percent in February 2004 to 51 percent in March of 2006. Of greater concern, among young people aged 18 to 29, a majority in several polls favors gay marriage.

To turn the demographic tide of young voters increasingly tolerant of same-sex marriage, conference organizer Tony Perkins looks to values "education." And that means changing the culture in ways outlined by several of the participants.

Interviewed after his conference session entitled "Hollywood in the Heartland," media expert Dr. Ted Baehr saw a huge shift being effected by means of an ascendant family-oriented media, especially film. Change is afoot, he noted, since "49 percent of the movies last year had positive Christian content. 40 percent of the movies were aimed at families." Baehr was contemptuous of films catering to the politically correct, pointing-out that "Brokeback Mountain after six months, say, made $73 million. At $6.50, $7 per ticket that's 10 million people, in a country of 300 million people. They couldn't even get their own people to go see Brokeback Mountain. That's how bad it was. Meanwhile, Chronicles of Narnia, a Christian film with a direct Christian allegory, did $780 million, and I cannot remember any major reviewer giving one positive review to Chronicles of Narnia."

Of the market for values-related films, Baehr added, "The average film with homosexual content — even with the big Brokeback Mountain that only made $70 million — averages $600,000 at the box office. Now that must tell us something. What it tells me is that year after year after year they're unable to assemble more than one percent of the population. And what it tells me about the political process: if we cater to the 0.1 percent, we're making a big mistake, because we're ignoring the 99.99 percent."

One example of the new trend is Fox's newly created unit, FoxFaith. The FoxFaith website explains that it is "a new branded distribution label from Twentieth Century Fox, created to house and distribute its growing portfolio of morally-driven, family-friendly programming. To be part of FoxFaith, a movie has to have overt Christian Content or be derived from the work of a Christian author."

Gay Marriage: Not Just a Marriage Issue Anymore

The urgent need to confront and reverse looming demographic trends explains why issues such as gay marriage dominated the 2006 Values Voter Summit. Marriage protection amendments have been enacted in 20 states, and this year there are eight more states where the issue appears on the ballot: Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin. With polls showing the Senate increasingly up for grabs, this list includes two of the three most closely contested Senate races, Virginia and Tennessee. In the third, Sen. Rick Santorum, a featured speaker at the Summit, is fighting for his political life in Pennsylvania while championing a federal constitutional amendment that would preclude any state from legalizing same-sex marriage.

Co-organizer Gary Bauer noted that the gay marriage issue might be determinative in several congressional races. Interviewed before he delivered his conference speech, Bauer predicted, "If the previous election is any example, it will increase the voter turnout by more traditional voters. And I think that in what could be a very close election this November these amendments may make the difference for conservative candidates." Asked about the Allen-Webb contest in Virginia, Bauer added, "Virginia is turning out to be a much closer Senate race than anyone expected. And it certainly could make a difference here. Particularly since the democratic candidate in the state has already made it clear that he's against the federal marriage amendment."

One featured speaker who addressed the marriage issue with authority was Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass) who leads the only state to have legalized same-sex marriage. Romney used the opportunity to take a clear swipe at Sen. John McCain without naming his potential political rival for the 2008 presidential race.

McCain who opposes a federal amendment to ban gay marriage, and is less than fully trusted by the Christian conservative leadership, did not attend the meeting. As if poking his finger in the chest of the absent McCain, Romney delivered, "The people I'm most upset with are people who say, 'I agree with you, governor. I believe in traditional marriage. But we shouldn't have a federal marriage amendment, we should leave it up to the states'."

Citing his own experience as governor of Massachusetts, Romney insisted, "We have to have a federal standard that says, Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman." Warning that his state's laxity foreshadowed not only the nationwide threat to traditional singular husband-wife marriage, but also to religious freedom and civic institutions in general, Romney adduced the example of Catholic Charities adoption services: "Catholic Charities, which has long placed many of our special needs kids... has had to exit the adoption practice in Massachusetts. They are now told they cannot prefer adoption into traditional couples...but they must equally...place children in same-sex homes."

This reflects a new political strategy that emerged at this Summit, one that is likely to further energize the conservative base while building on a 100% electoral success rate in the 20 states where constitutional amendments already have been passed that exclude same-sex marriage.

The argument proceeds as follows: Same-sex marriage constitutes a direct threat to religious freedom in general, the Catholic Charities case being just one small wave in what will be a giant tsunami of anti-Christian and anti-religious delegitimization and denial of rights.

Dobson and Perkins both stressed that gay marriage advocates are on a "collision course" with religious freedom. "And everything from tax exemptions of your schools, churches, right on down the line are in jeopardy if we fail to preserve [husband-wife] marriage in our society," Dobson warned.

Columnist Maggie Gallagher added that, once courts legitimize same-sex marriage, anyone who opposes such unions will be labeled a "bigot" and marginalized. Bigots "don't get thrown in prison. But they can't have a radio broadcasting license ... run an accredited school system ... run a tax exempt organization ... be a teacher in a public school."

Rev. Barry Lynn's Declaration of War Against Conservative Churches

Rev. Barry Lynn, leader of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the dominant liberal group attempting to politically block conservative Christians, attended the meeting and met privately with Dr. Dobson. In an interview with a reporter at the Summit, Lynn confirmed that his organization's primary focus is "helping the leaderships of organizations that were opposing the federal marriage amendment. Some of our state affiliates view it as important in their states."

Lynn issued a thinly veiled threat that political activism in or around churches as advocated by the meeting organizers may violate IRS guidelines and subject churches to loss of tax exempt status. Lynn announced that he has sent warning letters to the pastors of 117,000 churches.

Dobson and Perkins view Lynn's efforts as an attempt to intimidate Christian pastors and make them hesitant, for instance, to distribute issues-based Voter Guides rating candidates on marriage, life, school prayer, and other issues even though they do not expressly endorse a particular candidate or political party. These leaders argue that issues-based yet nonpartisan Voter Guides, voter registration drives, and get-out-the-vote efforts are perfectly legal and consistent with constitutionally protected religious rights and free speech rights. Says Perkins, "There is nothing in the federal tax laws to prevent a pastor from directly telling the congregation to support [issues or] legislation that the church believes to be beneficial to the community."

In an interview, Lynn condemned the political activity of conservative pastors in general, and the leaders of the Values Voter Summit in particular, sneering, "Talk about a failure of integrity at this meeting: For these people just to be honest, and say: We are partisan, we just support Republicans and that's what we're trying to get churches to do."

Pastors: ADF Offers Free Legal Defense

Alan Sears, head of the Alliance Defense Fund, the conservative Christian counterpart of the ACLU, offered this retort, "The ACLU and its allies depend on a campaign of fear, intimidation, and disinformation to silence the church." Responding to liberal threats from Lynn and others, Sears countered: "We've said that we will defend pastors that follow the guidelines" and do not endorse particular candidates. Perkins reinforced the point, noting that pastors "not only have the opportunity, but I believe we have an obligation, to be involved in our government process." Accordingly, "If you're challenged in any way, the ADF will represent you for free. Tony Perkins provided this assurance, "No longer in America when a pastor stands up, will that pastor stand alone."

Recently, the liberal threat turned all too real for two of the country's leading pastors with large congregations in Ohio. In an unprecedented organized assault on conservative churches that can only be likened to a Central Park "wilding," a group of 31 liberal pastors filed a formal complaint with the IRS against Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church and Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church claiming Parsley and Johnson illegally supported a Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio among other alleged infractions. Facing defeat at the polls election after election, liberal leaders, secular and religious, have thus openly declared war against politically active conservative churches.

Lynn: Internecine Warfare & The Liberal Informer Network

Commenting to a reporter, Lynn denied any reservations, noting that "Internecine warfare in Christendom, sadly, has occurred since the beginning of the Church."

Lynn denied that his group was directly involved in the Ohio complaints against the churches of Parsley and Johnson. But Lynn acknowledged that, nationwide, activists affiliated with his group are snooping on conservative churches and regularly reporting alleged violations.

Of his network of informers, Lynn disclosed to a reporter, "We do have activists that look to see what kinds of materials are distributed in and around churches, and if pastors are engaged in any illegal conduct." Lynn contends that members of his Madame Defarge brigades are obliged to report purported violations to the IRS, "I think they've got an obligation, a moral responsibility, to report that. In the same way that if you see a guy being beaten up in the street. You wouldn't say, Well, that guy goes to church so maybe I shouldn't worry about the guy throwing the punches."

By Rev. Lynn's own account he lives in a dog-eat-dog religious universe in which only the fittest churches will survive in the war of all against all. Lynn hastens to repeat for emphasis how important it is to inform against your neighbor's church, insisting that, "If you see something wrong then normally you are obliged to deal with it, report it. And that's all that happened in Ohio. It'll play-out either in the IRS or in the courts and one side will win and one side will lose. And that's the way it is."

In the end, Lynn offered Dobson and the other religious conservatives no quarter.

In his comments to the overflow crowd at the 2006 Values Voter Summit, Dobson had just spoken respectfully, even affectionately, of Lynn, reducing their differences to little more than perspective, "We don't see eye-to-eye," Dobson asserted, noting, "We are just coming from opposite sides of the universe."

When asked for his reaction moments later by a reporter, Lynn declared that a universe-wide gulf was not enough of a separation between the two of them. Lynn corrected Dobson insisting, emphatically and categorically, "we're coming from completely, entirely different universes, frankly."

Lib Free and Die: The War on the War on Terrorism

2006-01-30T01:03:00.000-05:00

See our latest article on Human Events Online:
Lib Free and Die: The War on the War on Terrorism
by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

Terri Schiavo's Autopsy: The Blind Spot

2005-06-21T08:01:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

HIGHLIGHTS OF PART ONE:

By reference to the medical literature adduces evidence that a substantial portion of the loss in Terri's brain weight observed postmortem may have been due to the dehydration to which she was subjected.

By reference to the medical literature adduces evidence that Terri's much-vaunted total cortical blindness may also be attributable to dehydration.

Refutes the Medical Examiners' suggestion that their autopsy findings are "very consistent with" the PVS diagnosis and for years Terri Schiavo was unable to see, recognize her family, think, or exercise any of the other higher mental functions that distinguish human life.

Refutes the Medical Examiners' suggestion that their autopsy findings prove that Terri Schiavo suffered irreversible brain damage and would not have benefited from rehabilitation.

Critiques poor medical and scientific reasoning and misleading statements by the Medical Examiners who performed the autopsy, as well as by the mainstream media and medical experts who supported the Medical Examiners' misinterpretation of the findings.

LINKS TO RELATED ARTICLES

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Terri Schiavo: The Locked-in State
... What Terri Taught Us
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PROOF: Judicial Filibusters Violate U.S. Constitution
... Every Senate has the right to make its own Rules, but not its own Constitution
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Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. - Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION

...thinking apparatus shriveled and shrunken, withered and liquified ... eyes merely appear to follow the actions of people and things around her ... completely blind, taking-in nothing and recognizing nothing ... appears to be responsive, but actually braindead; seemingly intelligent behaviors are nothing more than reflex movements.

Is this a description of Terri Schiavo? -- No.

As we demonstrate below, this description fits not Terri but the entire mainstream news media and the vast majority of the medical and legal experts who have commented on the Terri Schiavo "Report of Autopsy" issued on June 15, 2005 by the Florida District Six Medical Examiner.

Whatever the results of the Medical Examiner's (ME's) report may indicate about the condition of Terri Schiavo at the time of her death, we know from the mainstream media's hyped reporting that America's leading news outlets and reporters are mindlessly ill-informed, wilfully blind, thoroughly unprincipled, and miserably unschooled in the basic principles of medicine, the scientific method and statistics.

The news reports that the liberal media spewed-out on the Schiavo autopsy reveal little or nothing about whether Terri was braindead, blind, and incapable of feeling pleasure or pain. But they certainly yield insights into the sorry intellectual, moral and politicized state of the liberal media as well as the armies of medical and legal experts who prostitute themselves by shamelessly dispensing legally unsound and medically unsupported misinformation and disinformation without adequately informing themselves on the facts of the case.

~~~~~~~~~

What follows is Part One of a critique of the Autopsy Report and accounts of it in the media. This and each successive Part of the analysis presents a single issue in Q & A form.

This part of the Q & A series deals with the ME's diagnosis of Terri Schiavo as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).

Specifically, it questions the claim that the ME's Autopsy Report confirmed, or lent to support to, the PVS diagnosis. The news conference held by the ME that accompanied the release of the Autopsy Report left the widespread impression with the press and the public that the report provided conclusive proof that Terri was "braindead," unconscious," incapable of feeling any pain or pleasure, and unable to think, wish, will or recognize anyone or anything.

A copy of the official ME's report is available here, and here.

Streaming video of the ME's news conference discussing the Autopsy Report is available here.

~~~~~~~~~

"INCONSISTENT WITH" THE TRUTH

Before proceeding with the analysis of the Autopsy Report on the PVS question, it is essential to understand a certain category of medical and statistical terminology the use of which by the ME and the media is responsible for generating so much of the public's current confusion regarding the ME's autopsy findings.

Principal among these is the term "consistent with" as utilized by the ME. "Consistent with" is sometimes amplified by "very" as when The New York Times Editorial of June 16, 2005 quotes the ME as explaining that the autopsy findings were "very consistent with" a persistent vegetative state (PVS):

Although the autopsy could not definitively establish that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, the findings were deemed "very consistent with" that diagnosis.

What The Times and the rest of the liberal media and the medical experts "very consistently" confused, in a manner "not consistent" with being truthful and factual, is the fact that the term "consistent with" is as close to meaningless as you can get in medical terms. To say that a given finding is "consistent with" a particular diagnosis is just about the weakest connection you can make, diagnostically speaking. "Consistent with" is about a hair's breadth short of stating, "There was absolutely no relationship at all."

Just as a statistical correlation between two events is useless in establishing a causal connection, so the fact that a medical finding is "consistent with" a diagnosis is virtually meaningless in establishing what precisely the diagnosis might be.

The only really meaningful way to use the term is in excluding a diagnosis, in those cases where you can determine that the laboratory or autopsy findings are "not consistent with" such-and-such a diagnosis. Here the negative is of use in establishing either: (1) the data enables a given etiology or diagnosis to be "ruled-out" or excluded; or (2) through an arduous process of elimination, all known "consistent with" alternatives may be excluded, leaving only one as the presumptive explanation or cause for purposes of making the diagnosis.

Nearly 100 per cent of the time, when physicians say that a given test result, autopsy finding or other piece of data is consistent with a given diagnosis or determination, that very same finding is also "consistent with" a different, or even directly contrary, conclusion.

To say that a decedent's fractured skull is "consistent with" murder does not lend any substantive support to the notion that the decedent was murdered, since the same fracture may be, and often is, "consistent with" the contrary conclusion that the decedent was not-murdered (for example, fell and hit his head).

Applied to the Terri Schiavo case, when the ME states or implies, for example, that his findings were "consistent with" her having been in a PVS for many years prior to her death, every single one of those findings was equally "consistent with" the conclusion that she was not-PVS prior to her death.

When the scientific and medical data is equally consistent with both x and non-x as in the Schiavo case, then it is utterly meaningless to suggest, as the ME appears to have implied (predictably leaving the liberal mainstream news media to infer) that the data supports or establishes one or the other as true. Something meaningful has been said only when the physician or the ME can use data to "rule-out" something, by finding that the data is "not consistent with" such-and-such a diagnosis, or cause of death.

If the ME had said, for instance that the autopsy findings are "not consistent with" Terri Schiavo having been able to think, feel enjoyment and pleasure, or feel pain, then that would have represented a meaningful finding. Adding "very consistent with" PVS is as meaningless as saying that a woman's weight increase is "very consistent with" her being very pregnant. A woman is either pregnant or not pregnant, and a person is either conscious or not conscious. Nothing in the ME's autopsy findings rules-in or rules-out the one any more than the other. For a professional ME of many years experience to suggest otherwise is highly misleading and scientifically reprehensible. Yet The New York Times Editorial of June 16, 2005 directly quotes the ME as stating that his findings were "very consistent with" the PVS diagnosis. If true, the ME's actions would be "very consistent with" an extreme deficiency in scientific integrity and adherence to basic medical standards.

For purposes of understanding the Autopsy Report, the term "consistent with" should be considered nothing more than a wild guess or a hunch--at its best the epistemological equivalent of a loose correlation in terms of its level of certainty.

No responsible physician would ever perform surgery or administer medication merely based on the fact that one or more of his findings for the patient is "consistent with" a given disease or diagnosis. If the findings are "consistent with" two or five or ten different diagnoses, then before embarking on a risky course of surgical or other treatments, the ethical physician is first obliged to rule-out all but one. In the present case, the autopsy findings are perfectly "consistent with" two perfectly contrary diagnoses, PVS and not-PVS, and to claim that the postmortem findings somehow lend additional support to the PVS diagnosis in the Terri Schiavo case would be the height of medical fraud and duplicity.

The ME's responsibility for widespread misinterpretation of the autopsy findings in the liberal mainstream media is not diminished merely because he also drily and perfunctorily stated deep in the text of the formal print version of the Autopsy Report that "PVS is a clinical diagnosis arrived at through physical examination of living patients."

More serious reporters interested in accurate accounts would hav been able to discern the absence of evidence for PVS in the ME's printed Autopsy Report, but political enterprises such as CBS News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the AP and nearly all of their politicized reporters, columnists, and editorial staffs who handled the story ran with the "consistent with" line of fraudulent reporting instead. Consequently, nearly the entire print and broadcast media distributed wildly inaccurate and intentionally misleading accounts of the postmortem findings that went uncontested, such as those below:

Q & A

Does the Autopsy Report confirm that Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS)?

MEDIA ACCOUNT:

The AP reported on June 15, "An autopsy on Terri Schiavo backed her husband’s contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding that she had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, the medical examiner’s office said Wednesday."

Newsday went further, claiming in its "Health & Science" section that Terri Schiavo's brain was nothing but a mangled bundle of dead scar tissue, reporting that her "autopsy revealed that her brain was reduced to half its normal size and filled with scarred, dead tissue - evidence to medical examiners and neuropathologists that she was unable to carry out higher thinking."

The Washington Post's David Brown and William Branigin reported that, "The autopsy essentially supported Michael Schiavo's contention that his wife's brain damage was irreversible and that she had no cognitive ability."

Jim Axelrod reporting for the CBS Evening News: "It's the most widely anticipated autopsy in recent memory and the results couldn't be clearer." Proclaimed Axelrod, "That meant lost tissue, and lost tissue meant lost functions.

The night of the Autopsy Report release, Alan Colmes on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes program said, "The Pinellas-Pasco medical examiner, Jon Thogmartin, joined by Dr. Stephen Nelson today, described the condition as very consistent with a persistent vegetative state."

Likewise an ecstatically deranged Keith Olbermann of MSNBC opened his program by blurting-out, "The autopsy of Terri Schiavo is complete. She was in, and had been in, a persistent vegetative state. She had massive and irreversible brain damage." He manically backed-up his bold claim by asserting that the ME and other medical authorities had put their reputations and even their medical licenses on the line, "And if you do not believe those doctors, you have to be willing to believe that they would be willing to lose their licenses and jobs if they were proved to be incorrect."

NBC Today Show's Matt Lauer on June 16 may have been the one to pronounce the final, definitive medical judgment, asserting with oracular certainty, "The long-awaited autopsy report on Terri Schiavo was released on Wednesday. It concluded that she was in a persistent vegetative state, suffered from severe and irreversible brain damage."

On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, conservative Joe Scarborough thus seemed willing to throw the towel in at last, conceding, "And this is what they came out with. They said, when she died, Terri Schiavo, before she died, of course, had no brain activity."

What was most striking about the news reports was the smugness and certainty with which the purported scientific "facts" of the case were misreported. As printed in the Washington Post, famed science columnist Ellen Goodman disclosed, "No amount of treatment or rehabilitation would have reversed her condition. There was no doubt about it." Displaying her storied fact-checking abilities, Goodman added, "Now we know beyond any doubt that Terri Schiavo couldn't smile. Does this fact change even one opinion?"

MEDICAL EXPERTS' COMMENTARY:

Newsday claims to have consulted two anonymous "brain specialists" whose conclusions seemed to completely contradict the ME's Autopsy Report. According to Newsday reporter Jamie Talan, "The autopsy of Terri Schiavo found extensive damage throughout her brain, according to two Florida brain specialists who read the report. She lost all or most of her ability to think, recognize people and objects, and perform the simplest actions." Talan claims these two unsourced experts (she does not inform us whether they are neurologists, psychologists, or correspondence school grads) reported to her on the state of Schiavo's cerebral cortex. According to these "experts" there was, "Sever [sic] damage, with little gray matter left in the area responsible for thinking, remembering, math and higher thought. This suggests a persistent vegatative [sic] state." -- We only hope that their medical knowledge and Jamie's reporting skills exceed her ability to spell and her Newsday editors' ability to edit and verify unnamed sources.

Interviewed on the CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer (see article with video link), just after release of the ME's Autopsy Report, Dr. Douglas Miller, Director of Neuropathology at New York University Medical Center, had this exchange with CBS's Jim Axelrod concerning the Schiavo autopsy findings:

Dr. MILLER: This person could not perceive things from the outside at a conscious level, neither pain nor thirst nor who was around her.
Unidentified Man: (From videotape, speaking to Terri Schiavo) Open your eyes up! Good, good job!
AXELROD: So that familiar piece of videotape Schiavo's family and friends pointed to as evidence she was aware, has another definitive explanation according to...
Dr. MILLER: She was not aware, and appearances to the contrary in the videotape that was shown over and over and some of the accounts, those were reflexes.

We know how Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was excoriated in the media for merely suggesting that, while she was alive, Terri Schiavo may not have merited the PVS diagnosis based on his observation of videotaped recordings of her apparent conscious responsiveness.

Yet Schieffer and Axelrod are wildly ecstatic upon hearing Miller's method of error-proof PVS diagnosis-at-a-distance based on nothing more than postmortem findings in an Autopsy Report. The CBS duo never inquire of Miller whether he viewed the entire videotape (rather than just clips of a few seconds length shown on the network news shows). They are undoubtedly aware that he was rendering an expert opinion and expressing absolute certainty on the PVS diagnosis, without having ever examined the living patient and while relying exclusively on a thoroughly misleading and self-contradictory ME remark on the Autopsy Report. Yet the NYU medical expert continues to express absolute certainty on the PVS diagnosis to a ravenous Axelrod, denying with the certainty of a medieval authority even the slightest possibility that others, from family members to expert neurologists, consistently observed conscious responses in Terri Schiavo:

AXELROD: Not possible, at least medically speaking, says Miller. In fact, she was blind.
Dr. MILLER: [Those who claim Terri was conscious and responding to her environment] were seeing what they wanted to see, which is common and unfortunate."

In a June 16, 2005 broadcast segment, CBS's Axelrod, sensing the problem in concluding from postmortem autopsy findings to Terri's clinical function while alive, presses the NYU neuropathologist Dr. Miller on the postmortem brain weight finding's significance for the PVS diagnosis:

AXELROD: That meant lost tissue, and lost tissue
meant lost functions.
Dr. DOUGLAS MILLER: Wouldn't recognize anybody's face, wouldn't recognize anybody's voice, wouldn't respond to stimuli in anything but a reflexive way.
AXELROD: This autopsy is conclusive about that?
Dr. MILLER: In my opinion, yes.

This sort of desperate effort by Schieffer, Axelrod, et al to accumulate and promote fraudulent data that confirms a preconceived notion based on purely political motivation is reminiscent a similar effort by another recent divinity at CBS, Dan Rather. While CBS News anchor, Dan Rather became the point man for a scandalous journalistic effort that ultimately cost him his job and his reputation, the attempt to defeat the Republican incumbent in his presidential bid based on fraudulent memos from an obviously unreliable source. CBS appears to have figured-out that phony journalistic accounts and pseudo-expert opinions on the Autopsy Reports of already euthanized women provide a safer route to political success for the "news" organization.

We would like to know which one is the medical fraud: Dr. Frist, who spent an hour or more viewing the court-sanctioned videotaped examination of Terri Schiavo and merely raised a question about the PVS diagnosis; or Dr. Miller of NYU, who probably never viewed the extended tape of the live patient and who made a definitive PVS diagnosis based on the postmortem findings of the ME who himself wrote in the Autopsy Report that no conclusion as to PVS is legitimate based on the postmortem findings? -- We think it is obvious which of the two is more deserving of the prize for Outstanding Fraud of the Year. The only problem is that the right to the prize is being claimed by so many other medical experts, and by Bob and Jim and the rest of the integrity-challenged mainstream media.

LEGAL OPINION:

The principal blog on legal aspects of the Schiavo case, Abstract Appeal, states that: "The medical examiner's report explains that whether someone is in a persistent vegetative state is a clinical diagnosis that his office cannot evaluate after her death. However, the report does offer findings that are relevant to the PVS diagnosis."

On MSNBC's The Abrams Report, a less scrupulous but thoroughly mindless Dan Abrams felt sufficiently vindicated to dictate to his viewers, "Terri Schiavo's autopsy is complete. It sure seems her husband was right, that Terri was in a persistent vegetative state."

MEDICAL EXAMINER FINDINGS:

In the official print version of the Autopsy Report the ME, Dr. Jon Thogmartin, asks and answers: "Was Mrs. Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state (PVS)? - This can't be determined posthumously, though the findings of the autopsy were not inconsistent with this diagnosis: PVS is a clinical diagnosis arrived at through physical examination of living patients."

In spite of this caution lying unconscious in the print version of the ME's own Autopsy Report, Stephen Nelson, MD (consultant neuropathologist to the Medical Examiner and author of a major section of the Autopsy Report) reportedly did not hesitate to comment at the news conference in which the Autopsy Report was released: "There's nothing in her autopsy report, in her autopsy, that is inconsistent with persistent vegetative state."

At this June 15th news conference, Nelson also remarked that the Autopsy Report's findings are "very consistent with persistent vegetative state."

According to Keith Olbermann, Dr. Nelson also concluded that Terri Schiavo "would not have been able to form any cognitive thought--meaning no thinking, no emotion, no recognition of people. She couldn't have swallowed, and she was blind."

It is astonishing that both of the Medical Examiners principally responsible for the Autopsy Report acknowledge in the print version that it is illegitimate to use postmortem findings to retroactively make the clinical diagnosis of PVS, and yet in speaking to the press they make a point of repeatedly and consistently violating their own prohibition. In spite of the fact that the written report appears to have been cleansed of the more extreme forms of scientific dishonesty evident at the news conference, subtler manifestations are nonetheless apparent in the written report as well.

OUR REPLY TO THE MEDICAL EXAMINER'S SPIN OF THE AUTOPSY REPORT'S OBJECTIVE FINDINGS

As Thogmartin and Nelson clearly state in the written Autopsy Report, it is impossible to confirm a diagnosis of PVS postmortem--on the basis of an their own autopsy. As explained above, to say that the autopsy is "consistent with" persistent vegetative state is utterly devoid of meaning because it is just as true that the autopsy is "consistent with" Terri's having been in a conscious state of one level or another.

Therefore it was extremely misleading, and even medically reprehensible, for either ME to have stated to the press that the autopsy results are either "consistent with" or "not inconsistent with" a PVS diagnosis, without in every instance where the topic of PVS arose, emphasizing and repeatedly cautioning the press in the strongest possible terms that such a statement must not be misinterpreted as lending support to the PVS diagnosis. This caution appears not to have been given at the news conference.

The use of "consistent with," "very consistent with" and "not inconsistent with" decoupled from a blaring warning against misinterpretation provided the unscrupulous and politically-motivated members of the liberal mainstream media an opening to produce thoroughly dishonest reports and editorial commentary. Blindly led by the political machines of The New York Times and The Washington Post as well as CBS and MSNBC, many news outlets dispensed intentionally falsified news and commentary leaving the clear impression with the public that somehow the Autopsy Report either directly confirmed the PVS diagnosis, or excluded the possibility that Terri Schiavo was minimally--or more than minimally--conscious.

Having flooded the airwaves and filled the newspapers with this sort of junk medicine and junk reporting, aided and abetted by the ME and other willing accomplices among medical experts lacking any scruples, the liberal mainstream media prepared the ground for the next stage of the Crusade for Death, a series of fraudulent polls such as those conducted prior to Terri Schiavo's being euthanized. Legitimate polling data on the significance of the Schiavo case will, as before, go unnoticed in favor of the usual phony push-poll technique of manipulating public opinion.

We contend that this is more than a minor sin of omission on the ME's part; it is tantamount to a supersized-Big Lie. Without pretending to know what was in the minds of Drs. Nelson and Thogmartin, we might with justification raise the question whether this was a knowing and intentional deception on their part, particularly since the text of the Autopsy Report itself carefully had been scoured to rid it of any such misleading verbiage.

It bears repeating that Nelson's irresponsible statements to the press are all the more egregious in light of his own concluding statement in the written Autopsy Report, in which he pronounced clearly that "Neuropathologic examination alone of the decedent’s brain—or any brain, for that matter—cannot prove or disprove a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state or minimally conscious state."

We are convinced that Nelson either knew, or should have known, that his irresponsible and misleading "consistent with" and "not inconsistent with" statements to the press would predictably lead them to conclude that the autopsy directly supported the diagnosis of PVS. Dr. Thogmartin sat there and did nothing to contradict, or even qualify, what his colleague Dr. Nelson had to say.

The press and the public cannot be expected to know that beginning with the pioneering work of the great nineteenth century neurologist and neurophysiologist Duchenne it has been clear that clinical diagnoses and assessments of the quality and extent of the mental and motor functioning of the brain and the nerves, and the muscles they control, can only be obtained in the living patient, not postmortem. This applies not only to the higher mental functions but also to complex movements and expressions, from smiling and eating, to tracking visual objects. We know far too little about the functioning of the brain and particularly about its plasticity to be confident in drawing such inferences from autopsy findings.

ORIGINAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE AUTOPSY REPORT:

With Specific Reference to the PVS Diagnosis

Medical Examiner & The Media: Bulimia of the Brain.

The principal finding by the ME that was interpreted by the media and medical experts as supporting the PVS diagnosis was Terri Schiavo's brain weight. The ME's Autopsy Report disclosed that at the time of death Terri's brain weighed 615 grams, barely half the normal brain weight. The ME refers to sex, age, weight, and height differences without providing any data on the breakdown for these categories, and there is no supporting data on the standard deviations or correlations with level of brain function in severely brain-damaged patients. The impression is left with the press and the public that there is hardly anything left of Terri's brain that works, and that the autopsy findings conclusively prove that all of the important centers of cognitive and other high-level human functioning including volition, emotion, sense perception and feeling pain were utterly disabled if not destroyed.

Yet as we indicate below, the regions that govern cognition and emotion were largely intact in Terri's brain, and we have uncovered new findings in the medical literature suggesting that at least a large portion of the reduction in the weight of Terri's brain is likely attributable to the dehydration process to which she was subjected in being euthanized.

As we illustrate below, the media mimicked the ME in consistently mischaracterizing the degree of Terri's brain damage and the purported significance of her brain weight postmortem. The use of brain weight to support the PVS diagnosis may turn out to be as much of a fiction as the scandalous misattribution of her weight loss prior to 1990 to an imaginary diagnosis of bulimia for purposes of her husband's lawsuit. While the ME was at pains to refute the evidence for the fraudulent bulimia claim in the Autopsy Report, he merely substituted for it an equally absurd claim that Terri was in a PVS based on a spurious diagnostic entity invented for the ME's purpose--what might be termed "shrunken brain syndrome."

Shrunken, Shriveled, Withered, Liquified.

The media had a field day kicking around Terri's brain. It was common for the press to characterize her brain as if she were a victim of a head-shrinking tribe in deepest, darkest Africa. Before the autopsy, Terri's brain was frequently described as "liquified" by certain of the more refined members of the press corps, as if it had been removed, whipped-up in a blender, and then poured-back into her skull.

"Reporting" for NPR'S All things Considered on March 24, 2005, the celebrated liberal brain scientist and plagiarist Nina Totenberg remarked that "Terri Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state, that her cerebral cortex has been liquified, that she cannot feel, sense or think, and that she has no chance of recovery." And the entrancing Nina knows what that's like, no doubt from personal experience.

The release of the Autopsy Report on June 15, 2005 has unleashed an orgy of celebration in the media and Democratic Party circles over the diminutive size of Terri's brain postmortem, many of the characterizations being extraordinarily vicious and mean-spirited.

MSNBC presented an uplifting AP report about plans for releasing photographs of Terri's brain, citing "George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney, as revealing that Michael Schiavo plans to release autopsy photographs of her shrunken brain in the near future."

The Washington Post painted a delightful portrait of its own, enlightening its readers with the insight that, "A meticulous study of the organs, fluids, bones, cells and medical records of the Florida woman who became a cause celebre over the ‘right to die’ also found that her brain was severely shriveled and weighed about half that of a normal adult's."

Not to be outdone, The New York Times offered its own enchanting image, "An exhaustive autopsy found that Terri Schiavo's brain had withered to half the normal size since her collapse in 1990 and that no treatment could have remotely improved her condition, medical examiners said on Wednesday."

The earlier false account of "liquification" of Terri's brain notwithstanding (hydrocephalus ex vacuo due to brain atrophy is the actual process in which the space previously occupied by the atrophied tissue is replaced by cerebrospinal fluid), the finding of decrease in the size of Terri's brain should come as no surprise given the fact that she was deprived of all liquids and food for the two week period immediately prior to her death.

The brain no less than the rest of the body is composed largely of water. Common sense dictates that there will be significant weight loss in all organs under circumstances of extreme longterm dehydration.

Recent research confirms what common sense suggests, demonstrating that even shortterm dehydration lasting merely hours can produce substantial decrease in brain volume and, we might expect by extension, brain weight. At this point it is impossible to determine to what degree Terri's presumed loss in brain weight is attributable to longterm cerebral atrophy vs. nearly two weeks of total dehydration. Even a basic standard of decency, integrity and respect for truth would surely suggest, however, that the ME should have exercised more caution rather than heedlessly contributing to the utterly predictable "shrunken brain," "shriveled brain" "withered brain" stories that completely dominated the reporting.

In an article published just this year in the leading journal, Neurology, Dr. Duning and colleagues report that even shortterm dehydration lasting 16 hours can produce a significant decrease in brain volume in excess of a half of a per cent. Not directly answered in this study is the question whether the rate of decrease in brain volume due to dehydration directly corresponds to the overall bodily loss of weight, though this is certainly likely. In any case, common sense suggests that much of the loss of weight in Terri's case might be explained as a consequence of longterm dehydration over the two week period after her feeding tube was disconnected and she was denied any hydration or sustenance of any kind. The ME omitted all data on overall weight loss as a result of dehydration from the Autopsy Report on Terri Schiavo, though the report does indicate Terri's weight at the time of death was 112 pounds, providing a basis for comparison if she was weighed prior to removing her feeding tube.

Recovery of Mental Function: Evidence from Hemispherectomy.

Every week it seems there is a story in the media about the amazing brain with its ability to recoup from injuries due to its marvelous functional plasticity. This extraordinary capacity of the brain permits an injured brain region that controls for instance language or music or intellectual ability or motor function to effectively "relocate" itself to alternate uninjured areas and rebuild from scratch seemingly lost capacities and connections. In recent years and months any number of television programs have been aired and a veritable barrage of articles written concerning individuals with intractable seizure and other neurologic disorders who have undergone a procedure known as hemispherectomy in which all or most of the diseased side of the brain is removed surgically.

Clearly, hemispherectomy patients suffer an extreme loss in brain weight (approaching the 50% loss supposedly suffered by Terri) even though in cases where the alternate method of functional hemispherectomy is used, something less than the full half of the brain is removed. These operations are usually highly successful, especially in children, most of whom regain normal intellectual, language and other functioning.

This is not at all to suggest that a PVS diagnosis is always unwarranted in patients who suffer an extreme degree of brain atrophy resulting in a loss of a large percentage of the brain's volume or weight. Yet it is just as impossible to conclude from a postmortem finding of low brain weight that the patient was PVS prior to his death.

With respect to the question of PVS, Terri's autopsy is perfectly incapable of providing instructive answers. While a marked loss of brain weight or volume after surgery or other brain insult is "consistent with" PVS, it is equally "consistent with" a minimally conscious state or even a fully conscious state. The level and state of consciousness is a function of a variety of factors most of which are not meaningfully illuminated by an autopsy--or brain weight. Most hemispherectomy patients return to a fully conscious state, with restoration of cognitive and other abilities, despite suffering loss of half, or nearly half, of their brain weight. At least as important as the brain's weight is the determination of which areas of the brain are lost to surgery, trauma or other forms of insult.

Error Rate in PVS Diagnosis.

As noted many times during the course of the controversy over whether to euthanize Terri, the diagnosis of PVS is subject to an error rate as high as 43 per cent even when the evaluation is done in living patients, according to a study by leading investigators and carried out at the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability, London and published in the British Medical Journal. Should life and death decisions be made on the basis of a diagnostic category misapplied in nearly one out of every two cases?

Postmortem assessments of PVS are completely illegitimate and anyone such as Dr. Miller of NYU who treats postmortem data as sufficient to establish a conclusive diagnosis of PVS is practicing junk medicine. What basis does Dr. Miller have to appear on CBS Nightly News to ridicule family, friends, and physicians who carefully studied Terri Schiavo when she was alive and reached the contrary conclusion? Did Dr. Miller ever examine her during her life? Did he ever read her entire patient record? Did he view the full videotapes of her being examined by neurologists who are disability experts? Did he read their reports or listen to their comments?

Some of the more irresponsible diagnosticians with purported "expertise" in assessing consciousness may even have a demonstrable track record of 100 per cent misdiagnosis rate in PVS. This will be demonstrated in a future publication in which we will discuss the diagnosis of PVS in Terri's case.

We maintain that for all of the above reasons it was misleading for the ME to employ the language of "consistent with" to suggest to the press and the public that the weight of Terri's brain was of substantive evidentiary value on the PVS question.

We also contend that Dr. Nelson's comparison in the Autopsy Report of the weight of Terri's brain to that of another patient, Karen Ann Quinlan, is equally misleading and liable to being criticized as intentionally deceptive. To the best of our knowledge, Karen Ann Quinlan died naturally of pneumonia and was not euthanized by means of longterm dehydration. It would therefore seem that for this reason alone there is little if any basis for comparison. The reference to Karen Ann Quinlan in the Autopsy Report appears to be gratuitous; yet another possible example of intentional misrepresentation and deception meriting inquiry as to its significance and motivation.

Irreversibility of Brain Damage: non sequitur.

We were extremely disappointed in the intellectually dishonest comments of Medical Examiner Dr. Jon Thogmartin on the issue of Terri's putatively irreversible brain damage. The ME stated that, "This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." This account is a prime example of a non sequitur, falsely suggesting that the antecedent somehow supports the consequent.

Now, by definition, since neurons cannot be regenerated in the living human brain, when neurons die there is no way they can be regenerated. This is true of every person alive, not just Terri Schiavo, since in varying degrees we have all suffered a limited quantity of non-regenerable neuronal death. For most of us the loss of a certain number of neurons over the course our lives is not noticeable until we reach an advanced age. To state that Terri's neuronal loss, as being irreversible, is somehow special, or particularly significant, is therefore completely misleading. All neuronal loss is "irreversible," as Dr. Thogmartin well knows.

Patients who undergo major brain surgery and victims of serious head injuries and other brain insults and disease processes have all suffered significant death of neurons none of which can be regenerated. In consequence, to this extent they have all suffered "irreversible brain damage." But the vast majority can recover significantly from their temporary loss of motor or mental function, without meriting anything like a PVS diagnosis.

Once again, the ME is being at best unintentionally misleading and at worst intentionally deceptive by making the utterly meaningless and even tautological statement that, "This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." In doing so he leaves the clear impression with the press and the public that there is something special, final and irreversible about the effect on mental functioning of the death of neurons in Terri's particular case.

Out of the "fact" that Terri has allegedly sustained some unique type or extent of neuronal loss "consistent with" PVS, the ME creates the utterly false impression that this proves beyond doubt that in fact Terri was braindead and that in all of the areas of mental and motor functioning she would never have received any benefit from therapy while she was alive.

These two points are completely distinct and the distinction needs to be maintained by any legitimate ME issuing an Autopsy Report, if he is to avoid the accusation of extreme negligence and irresponsibility, or worse: (1) autopsy data on the distribution and quantity of neuronal damage in the brain, all of which entails permanent and irreversible loss of neurons; and (2) whether the patient can recover function through medication, surgery, rehabilitation, or the natural healing process.

Dr. Thogmartin appears to have utterly confused the two concepts in a manner that can only be described as reprehensible for being extremely negligent and misleading in an official charged with the objective, factual, and accurate assessment of the cause of death in Terri Schiavo's case. If this is true, he deserves the sharpest possible criticism, even if he claims that his extremely misleading statements were not designed to deceive. It is difficult to imagine, however, that he did not anticipate how these reckless remarks would have been received, interpreted and deployed by the rabidly pro-death mainstream media.

It must be said that, in the Thogmartin-Nelson Autopsy Report and news conference, no less than in the media reports, the facts of Terri's case have been consistently stated in a slanted and tendentious way to suggest that the postmortem evidence is confirmatory of PVS and irreversible loss of all conscious function, something that can hardly ever be established by postmortem data. This includes the opportunity for Terri to regain the ability to eat and drink by mouth, as we will explain in a subsequent section of this Q & A series.

Perhaps the most deplorable medical commentary on the Schiavo case in general, and the Autopsy Report in particular, has come from the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden. On Fox's show,
On The Record With Greta Van Susteren, Baden mystically intuited from the 2005 autopsy findings, "The damage occurred in a few minutes in 1990, [her brain] shrunk down to less than half its size and all of the cells for consciousness, all of the cells for seeing, she was blind all this time, all the cells that could recover and give her more function just disappeared."

PVS vs. Preservation of the Frontal and Temporal Lobes.

What went largely unreported in the media is the interesting section of the Autopsy Report entitled, "Neuropathology Macroscopic Description," written by Dr. Nelson, wherein he coldly observes without comment that, "The changes seen were striking in their appearance, and global in their distribution. They predominantly involved the border zone ("watershed") areas and were most severe in the occipital lobes, with relative preservation of the frontal and temporal lobes." The ME also remarks, "The frontal temporal and temporal poles and insular-cortex demonstrated relative preservation."

While Nelson here does nothing to quantify "relative preservation," it is worth noting that the "relative preservation" of the frontal and temporal lobes speaks, if anything, against the diagnosis of a PVS state and is certainly "consistent with" higher cortical functioning with consciousness of some degree. This finding is of no evidentiary value on the PVS question apart from the fact that it makes it all the more illegitimate for any medical expert or the media to conclude from the Autopsy Report to a PVS diagnosis. As meaningless as this term "relative preservation" may be, the preservation of these brain regions makes the autopsy "consistent with" consciousness. This includes anything ranging from a minimally conscious state, to some variant of the "locked-in syndrome" in which the paralyzed patient is conscious, but unable to move or form meaningful sounds--essentially a prisoner trapped in his own body. Clearly this fact alone does not dictate that Terri had to have been cognitively "normal" or even conscious at all. Nor does it prove, as one medical ethicist has suggested through WorldNetDaily, that "What this tells us is that her cortex retained function." As noted above, such determinations are entirely outside the scope of postmortem data and can be made only through examination of the living patient.

NEW EXPLANATION FOR TERRI's PUTATIVE CORTICAL BLINDNESS: DEHYDRATION.

There is yet another potentially spurious interpretation of the objective data by the ME in the Autopsy Report: his suggestion that Terri suffered from total cortical blindness predating her death. Cortical blindness involves severe neuronal loss in the brain's visual cortex despite eyes that are anatomically and structurally healthy and intact .

The clear implication is that court-ordered videotapes of neurologic examinations from 2002 in which Terri Schiavo clearly appears to track visual objects, and visually recognize and react to people in her environment are examples of merely coincidental reflex movements being misinterpreted as visual and other conscious mental responses due to wishful thinking on the part of those wanting to keep her alive.

"Her vision centers of her brain were dead," the ME claimed. Thogmartin continued, "Therefore, Mrs. Schiavo had what's called cortical blindness. She was blind, could not see."

The clear implications of the ME's assertion (not to mention its mocking, hymnal tone) are: (1) that Terri was totally blind for the weeks, months and years prior to her death; and (2) that the widespread impression that she had vision and the capacity to track objects and even recognize people is a complete fiction or delusion on the part of her supporters, including neurologists who are experts in disability assessment. The statement, "She was blind, could not see," is senseless if limited to the period after her death or even the two week period where she was dying of dehydration. The ME's claim makes sense and has significance only if he was referring to the years and months prior to her death when she was being sustained by a feeding tube and her supporters were fighting to keep her alive.

Whatever his thought process, it is certain that the ME's contention that Terri suffered from cortical blindness predictably left the absolutely clear and unmistakable impression with the press and the public nationwide and worldwide that for years and years prior to her death Terri was totally blind and never saw or recognized anybody. Here the ME was contradicting the claims of parents, siblings, and friends who interacted with her, and several of the physicians and neurologists specializing in disability assessment who very thoroughly examined her level of mental, sensory and motor functioning back in 2002.

Leaving aside the claims of her supporters that Terri was sighted, prior to removal of her feeding tube and particularly back in 2002 when she was videotaped seemingly responding to visual stimuli, there are several factors that call into question both the ME's diagnostic interpretation and his personal motivation in communicating it:

(1) It is necessary to point out that it is virtually impossible for an autopsy to firmly date the onset of cortical blindness in a case such as Terri's. The mere fact that a decedent has massive neuronal damage to the occipital lobes at the time of autopsy does not prove that all or any such damage was present one month, one year, or one decade prior to death. On these grounds alone, we can say that Dr. Thogmartin was unwarranted in interpreting the findings as he did. Thogmartin all but dictated to the press that, back in 2002 when the court-sanctioned videotapes were made of her clearly appearing to track visual objects, this was all an illusion, and: "She was blind, could not see." We may cite on this question no lesser authorites than the two MEs, Drs. Thogmartin and Nelson themselves, as acknowledging in their written Autopsy Report that it is not legitimate or reliable to retroactively diagnose the clinical state in a living patient using that patient's postmortem findings--particularly when the higher mental, sensory and motor functions are in question.

(2) There is nothing in the autopsy findings that negates the possibility that, having sustained a severe anoxic insult to her brain in 1990 (or at some later stage) causing major damage to her occipital lobes, Terri suffered for years not from total cortical blindness but from some degree of what is known as cortical visual impairment. To use the language of the ME, it is perfectly "consistent with" the postmortem findings that the damage to her occipital lobes occasioned a less-than-complete blindness. There are several possible causes of occipital lobe damage capable of causing cortical blindness or cortical visual impairment, one of which is elevated pressure due to hydrocephalus. -- To repeat, the postmortem finding reported by the ME, of "hypoxic damage and neuronal loss in her occipital lobes which indicates cortical blindness," is by no means proof that Terri was totally blind either in 2002 or even early in 2005 prior to implementation of the dehydration order. While this postmortem finding is "consistent with" longterm total cortical blindness, by no stretch of the imagination does it provide proof that she was totally blind during the years, months or even weeks prior to her being euthanized by dehydration. The fact is, there is every reason to suspect that Terri Schiavo had partial vision for years prior to the execution of the dehydration order.

(3) Lastly, we suggest it is also possible, according to recent reports in the medical literature such as this, that the devastating dehydration to which Terri was subjected during the last two weeks of her life, might have exacerbated her already existing cortical visual impairment. This dehydration, producing varied neurotoxic effects not at all limited to the loss of basic brain weight and volume referenced above, may have induced an ischemic insult in the occipital cortical region thereby occasioning significant neuronal loss that was magnified as the effects of dehydration progressed. It is not our intent to explain the actual mechanism that might have led to the objective autopsy finding of pervasive damage to the occipital lobes, but merely to remind the ME, the press and the public that such a postmortem finding does nothing to prove the existence of total cortical blindness prior to the inception of the dehydration process. -- What might have been the effects of dehydration on Terri’s visual cortex, and did the dehydration process hasten the demise of already vulnerable brain structure? -- Based on the autopsy, there is reason to believe that back in 1990, Terri's visual cortex had borne the brunt of the anoxic attack in which she sustained profound damage to the occipital lobes and proximate regions of her brain. We may speculate that the already impaired visual centers of her brain were therefore most vulnerable to subsequent insults such as the severe dehydration that caused her death when her feeding tube was disconnected. Accordingly, what the ME found at autopsy may reflect the accelerated effects of extreme dehydration within the last two weeks of her life upon the already diseased visual cortex rather than what would have been the state of Terri's visual cortex had she not been deprived of fluids and feeding through her feeding tube.

All of the above evidence suggests that the Medical Examiners, Drs. Thogmartin and Nelson, likely went into the autopsy process with the preconceived notion that Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), incapable of any human mental functioning or even feeling pain, despite convincing evidence to the contrary. By bending and breaking the rules and standards of science and medicine, including those contained in their own Autopsy Report, they convinced themselves of the veracity of what they already knew prior to autopsy, and identified data such as reduced brain weight and cortical blindness that supported their preconceived conclusions. They then set about systematically providing the press with their manufactured "evidence" for the PVS diagnosis, knowing that the impatient liberal mainstream media was primed to spread these lies to the public in order to advance their political and social agenda.

CONCLUDING POSTSCRIPT TO AN UNSCIENTIFIC AUTOPSY REPORT: A MEDICAL "WILDING"

The ME's Autopsy Report, and the reporting on it, provide an object lesson in media and medical misinformation and deliberate distortion, amounting to a "medical wilding" with Terri as its victim.

On virtually every issue of importance to her family and public policy, the ME's Autopsy Report lent itself to misinterpretation and misuse. If our analysis is correct, the statements to the press by the ME were tendentious, negligent, and irresponsible in the extreme, and their PVS inferences from the limited facts and objective findings of the autopsy were consistently unsupported and designed to deceive. The contrast between their reckless remarks at the news conference, and the somewhat more carefully stated facts presented in the print version of the Autopsy Report, further support the suspicion that they were pursuing an agenda in their presentation but wanted to hide behind more cautious formulations in the formal report.

Their distorted interpretations of the facts both in the print version and particularly in the news conference directly contributed to wildly misleading reports in the liberal mainstream media and the other pro-death propaganda mills.

In our opinion, the Pinellas County Medical Examiner Dr. Jon Thogmartin and the consulting forensic neuropathologist Dr. Stephen Nelson, the Medical Examiner of Polk County, who jointly produced the Autopsy Report deserve criticism no matter what their explanation. Either they intentionally deceived the public with comments that lent themselves to predictable misuse by the politically motivated liberal mainstream media, or they were incompetent and negligent in not anticipating the consequences of their confused, misleading and equivocal statements.

Their unscientific interpretation of the facts and their biased presentation was irresponsible in the extreme. Cautionary statements buried deep within the text of the Autopsy Report do not provide adequate cover for a presentation that in the overall sense followed an arc of untruth and provided ammunition to those in the media engaged in an aggressive assault on the truth for political purposes. In most cases this was due to Thogmartin and Nelson ignoring their own cautions against drawing unscientific inferences about the functional capacity of Terri Schiavo's mind and body during her lifetime, based on the physical state of her brain at the time of autopsy.

The strategy of the liberal mainstream media and the biased medical experts on whom they relied for cover in analyzing and interpreting the facts, is the scientific equivalent of the proverbial cheating husband caught in the act by his wife. The husband, caught in flagrante dilicto, says, Look, honey, what are ya gonna believe, what I tell you or your own lying eyes?

The media promulgated the deception that everyone’s eyes really did lie, that the videotapes clearly showing Terri recognizing her relatives and expressing pleasure and pain were the product of delusions and hallucinations. Armed with the ME's misleading interpretation of the postmortem data, the media was convinced it had a license to purvey the Big Lie that Terri Schiavo was merely a mindless lump of withered matter, a mere vegetable, incapable of thought, will or emotion and even incapable of feeling pain--functioning merely by the same reflex jerking seen in a recently severed frog’s leg.

Some frog, some leg.

It is the liberal mainstream news media that is braindead and beyond resuscitation. They are the ones who have suffered total blindness, who are permanently and totally incapable of seeing or recording or reporting reality. Their minds and souls and senses are completely withered, neuronally dead, irremediably and irreversibly so. They are sustained by their corporate feeding tubes and financial life support, dying a very slow, slow death without feeling any twinge of pain or remorse. Yet in their case no judicial authority exists to order mercifully that the plug be pulled. The autopsy report is yet to be written.

LINKS TO RELATED ARTICLES

Terri Schiavo: The Locked-in State

... What Terri Taught Us

PROOF: Judicial Filibusters Violate U.S. Constitution

... Every Senate has the right to make its own Rules, but not its own Constitution

RETURN TO HOMEPAGE

Psychotherapy for Art

2005-06-16T11:41:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

How can we be surprised that American education is mired in failure when the education establishment diverts so much of its energy and resources into playing the roles of substitute parent, drug counselor, "reproductive health" center, and mental health clinic? How make room for genuine learning with all of these extra-curricular responsibilities increasingly appropriating educational space that should be devoted to teaching the essentials of reading and writing, mathematics and history? With so many extraneous matters preoccupying teachers and students, what’s left to rouse education from its therapeutic, empathic, multicultural, values-neutral slumber? Who’s left to represent the "Education Wing" of the Education Party?

Much the same deranged and devolutionary death spiral characterizes the politicized and psychologized realm of the arts. The despair and vacuity in contemporary art no less than in education results from the wholesale abandonment of the centuries-old assumption and pursuit of transcendent and unbargainable moral, aesthetic and intellectual standards in favor of the deceptive depth of what is nothing but the inky shallowness of instrumentalism, subjectivism, and relativism.

His current enthusiasm for tonal music notwithstanding, Miles Hoffman's essay, "Music’s Missing Magic" in the current issue of The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2005. Vol. 29, Iss. 2; p. 28) is Exhibit A for what's wrong with the arts in America today. Hoffman is just another philistine hyper-aesthete from the radical left posing as art critic -- in his case, for NPR -- and also posing as a defender of tonal music…or is it atonal music…or is it classical music… or … just hoping something "magical" will happen?

Hoffman appears to be a tortured soul who in his search for relief from psychic pain and in his quest for meaning in his own life has purchased a lifetime subscription to the snake oil dispensers of Freudianism (or one of its therapeutic equivalents). In his essay, Hoffman transmutes the misunderstood musings of a third tier poet into a definition of art as "therapy" for loneliness and for the rest of modern man’s purported psychic ills. Art as therapy for pain and loneliness appears to be Hoffman’s prescription formulated to remedy the diseased state of music today.

In a pathologically psychologized culture such as ours, should one be surprised that it is impossible for any true painting, music or other art to flourish? Only when artists and critics thoroughly undo the influence of the Freudian, Jungian and other fraudulent psychological theories that for the better part of a century have driven nearly all of the fine arts into the ground (not to mention their calamitous impact on popular artistic forms such as film), will any rebirth of genuine art be remotely possible.

An old friend of ours recounted the family story of his grandmother’s reaction to his grandfather’s death. Through travail, she had delivered unto grandpa 13 children—that’s the number recalled from the long-ago telling of the events. Prolific grandpa died several years after the last of these 13 children was born, and the family assembled for the burial service. When the casket was lowered and covered with earth, to everyone’s surprise grandma tramped over and unceremoniously sat herself down right on top of grandpa’s grave. As the family tried to coax her away, she resisted, proclaiming that 13 children was enough and she was darned well going to make sure he wasn't coming back for more.
Grandma’s throwing her own body into the breach should serve as an example to us all: When someday the stake is driven into the heart of Freudian theory and its radical left artistic and academic appendages, and they are finally laid to rest, we are obligated to be no less vigilant than grandma.

Quoting the von Schober poem Franz Schubert incorporated into his song, "An die Musik":

O gracious Art, in how many gray hours
When life's fierce orbit encompassed me,
Hast thou kindled my heart to warm love,
Hast charmed me into a better world.
Oft has a sigh, issuing from thy harp,
A sweet, blest chord of thine,
Thrown open the heaven of better times;
O gracious Art, for that I thank thee!

... Hoffman ponders the question:

But just how does our gracious Art exercise these powers? How does it comfort us, charm us, kindle our hearts? We might start our search for answers by positing two fundamentals: a fundamental pain and a fundamental quest. A fundamental pain of our human condition is loneliness. No surprise here: We're born alone, we're alone in our consciousness, we die alone, and, when loved ones die, we're left alone. And pain itself, including physical pain, isolates us and makes us feel still more alone, completing a vicious circle. Our fundamental quest--by no means unrelated to our aloneness and our loneliness -- is the quest for meaning, the quest to make sense of our time on earth, to make sense of time itself.

Hoffman's dismal and enfeebled essay here confuses: (1) the incidental fact that art may have the effect of "making sense" of his miserable and lonely life, realizing his failed human potential, or soothing and distracting his own tormented soul, er, brain (or, allegedly, von Schober’s –and, by the way, who remembers von Schober apart from Schubert's music?); with (2) the true essence and aim of art which is, and ought to be, an acausal and transcendent effluence of the free and creative will, having absolutely nothing to do with Hoffman’s senseless quest to escape from his meaningless life or gain relief from his debilitating psychological pain. Only in the mind of the 60’s radical is there a self-evident identification of the goals of art and therapy.

Fittingly, Hoffman’s essay concludes with what might be the aspiring rock star’s plea to the god of the groupies: "O gracious Art, let's hope we get lucky."

The pathological state of today's art and art criticism is above all due to the fact that both are hopelessly enervated by the pervasive influence of a noxious concoction the most pestilential ingredients of which are fraudulent psychological theorizing and radical leftist politics of the postmodern relativist sort. This is the same witches’ brew that has progressively laid waste to modern education in general and the public school system in particular.

We may only hope that the current stirrings of a much-needed critique of Freudian and related forms of psychological pseudo-theorizing will slowly but relentlessly trickle-down into some succeeding generation of naïve students entering the academy who, repulsed by the perversion of art witnessed for so many decades, will manage to extirpate all remnants of psychology and radical leftist politics from the arts. As one great thinker suggested, when reason and truth fail you in your battle against those who block progress toward knowledge, all you can do is wait until your opponents die-off.

Now, on the day that happens, can’t you just picture the ghosts of old Franz and a host of other great artistic geniuses sitting themselves down--in unison--on the graves of these 60’s radicals and psychologizing defilers of true art?

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Read our latest article in Human Events

Judicial Filibuster, Part I: Clinton Heir Apparent

2005-05-19T04:47:00.000-05:00

In Harry Reid, the Senate Democrats have a worthy successor to Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle. Though not quite up to the standards of Clinton in subtlety of equivocation or Daschle in opportunistic obstruction, Reid is a worthy successor to both of these leaders of the Democratic Party.

Read our latest article in Human Events, part I of a forthcoming series on the judicial filibuster and the true motivation behind it.

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Terri Schiavo: Pyrrhic victory for "Death Wing" of the Democratic Party

2005-03-31T16:08:00.000-05:00

Terri Schiavo died today; it will surely prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for what we have here termed the "Death Wing" of the Democratic Party. We should "offer a bird to Aesclepius"!

See our column in Human Events, the first in a series on the judicial murder of Terri Schiavo:

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Terri Schiavo: The Locked-in State

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros
She challenged assumptions about our selves, souls, lives, moral principles and our government

PERMALINK: http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7016

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Terri Schiavo: The Locked-in State

2005-03-31T10:44:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

Over 2000 years ago the Athenians condemned and executed the philosopher Socrates and the Romans tortured and murdered Jesus Christ. We tend to dismiss the mindless cruelty and barbarity of these acts, this snuffing-out the lives of two of the greatest benefactors of mankind, as quite understandable, even if lamentable, given the assumption that ancient societies were unfamiliar with the refinements of modern liberal democracy, limited representative government, checks and balances, minority rights and the like. Such travesties of justice could never occur in our modern, highly evolved age--certainly not in America. Cold-blooded court-sanctioned murder of innocents, not to mention the noblest and best of our fellow citizens, is unthinkable here. What happened in ancient Athens and Jerusalem could never be replicated under our system of laws, in our enlightened age, with a Bill of Rights, standards of proof, jury trials and all the other available protections of individual rights. Compassionate Americans would never stand for their government yanking perfectly innocent citizens off the streets, from their workplaces or out of their homes without due process of law. The slow pace of justice coupled with all the statutory and constitutional protections insures that mistakes are almost always avoided or corrected once brought to the public’s attention. With the endless stream of motions and appeals, death penalty cases can easily take more than a decade to resolve. Anyway, Americans would rather see the proverbial “ten guilty men go free, than one innocent man wrongly imprisoned or executed.” The torture to which the benighted Romans subjected Jesus cannot happen here in America. Those who participate in merely moral or intellectual disagreements or protests need not fear persecution; certainly not capital punishment. Why, the state is powerless to even arrest open traitors in our midst, much less exterminate those we believe are miseducating our young. We Americans, we’re modern; we’re open-minded; we’re compassionate; we’re tolerant; we’re pluralistic; and we pride ourselves above all in protecting the powerless and downtrodden. Apart from some individual who in the dark crevices of the justice system is unknowingly framed, or erroneously convicted by corrupt officials, things like that just don’t happen in the full light of public scrutiny. The lumbering machinery of the state and its criminal justice system, its courts, would never permit government-ordered murder right out in the open, right in front of our eyes. Not with the full attention of every member of the House of Representatives, every United States Senator, every judge in every federal court in the land--from the lowest federal district court to the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court, with the full knowledge of a governor and even the president of the United States. After all, we have a free and open media eager to scrutinize every capital case, every government injustice, every government overreach.

Well, the case of Terri Schiavo gives the lie to all of it. The state-sanctioned judicial torture-murder of Terri Schiavo serves to remind modern man that little has changed over the last 2400 years plus. The State power quite openly decided that Christ and Socrates were troublemakers who needed to be stopped. Both were fated for State execution from the beginning. The life and death of the philosopher Socrates may not be quite as familiar to every American as Jesus’s. Socrates devoted his life to educating his fellow Athenians to the nature of justice in the conviction that knowledge was the path to justice. But he was put to death by the very system of justice he spent his life trying to improve through his searching style of education that has come to be known as the Socratic method, asking the kinds of questions that make the self-satisfied uneasy. Socrates was a man who found the highest value reflected in the soul of every human being he met. He engaged and examined each person intellectually and morally, challenging those with whom he agreed no less than those who disagreed with him. He was a man who dared to stare directly at the glaring light of the truth without averting his eyes. If we stare too long directly at the light of the sun, it blinds us permanently. Socrates contrasted the sunlight that blinds the physical eyes with the healing mindlight of pure intellection--demonstrating that the longer we stare at the light of pure truth, the more our soul’s vision is healed. Even when threatened with death, Socrates refused to desist from exhorting his fellow citizens to be guided by the pure light of divine knowledge of justice, ever encouraging them to avoid being tricked by the dazzling things of this world whose brightness is merely reflective, transitory and illusory. For living his life in unstinting pursuit of truth and reality, and for encouraging his fellow citizens to do the same, he was sentenced by his Athenian citizen-judges to death on the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens, and executed after a short term in prison. Caring little for life in this world, and welcoming the death that would bring him everlasting life without the burden of the body encasing his soul, Socrates refused to abandon his search for God and Truth. His plea to the judges was not to spare his life for his own benefit--for by then he was over 70 years old and would soon die anyway even if pardoned--but rather that the state should refrain from this grievous injustice for its own sake, and that of his individual accusers. Socrates was convinced that to do evil is infinitely worse than to suffer evil at the hands of another and that, just as illness destroys the body, so great injustice destroys the soul of the unjust individual and country. His plea went unheeded by his enemies and his State, and we know that his countrymen suffered grievously after his death. We may only imagine the judgment that awaited those who falsely accused him, adjudged him guilty, and executed him. As we all know, Socrates’ religious counterpart, Jesus Christ, as pure a man as ever lived, was betrayed and tortured unmercifully before being crucified, laughingly reviled for his willingness to purchase the lives of others with his own torture and death. Thousands of those who remained true to his ideals and teachings have been similarly reviled, tormented and murdered merely for living in Jesus Christ’s name.

The case of Terri Schiavo is not without parallels to the lives of these men, as startling as that claim may seem. Of course, Terri never taught a course or delivered a sermon, never evinced expansiveness of intellect or professed deep spiritual ideas. Unlike Jesus and Socrates, Terri did not intentionally provoke her fellow men into pursuing certain spiritual paths or intellectual questions. But are those the only paths to serving as a great educator of mankind?

If nothing else, Terri Schiavo certainly shares with Socrates and Jesus the quality of innocence. It is ironic that in her debilitated state, brain damaged and unable to report either what happened to her 15 years ago or her present thoughts and wishes, she has become one of mankind’s leading moral provocateurs. -- What is life? What constitutes a fulfilled life? Who should make judgments on the continuation of life? Under what circumstances should the life of the physically or mentally disabled be prolonged? Does illness or injury necessarily diminish the will to live? -- Terri causes us to think about these essential questions at depths and in ways not encountered in recent times. What makes her so compelling is the fact that she is the embodiment of the most difficult and complex problems we face today. She has challenged our assumptions about our selves, our souls, our lives, our moral principles and even our system of government more fundamentally than any human being in decades, even centuries.

Unlike Christ or Socrates, Terri Schiavo was said to have no mind with which to mount her own defense. In this postmodern age in which we are entranced with the marvels of technological wizardry, and in which we seem to worship the body more and more, it is stunning that the greatest human lessons about human existence are being learned from someone who, while she lived, was diagnosed as being Persistent Vegetative State, said to suffer from a brain that had liquified (in the immortal words of The New York Times and The Washington Post and many leading physicians) with nothing left that mentally resembled human life.

Unlike Christ or Socrates, Terri Schiavo was reported to have no voice. While the former suffered so harshly for eloquently giving voice to their provocative ideas, she suffered precisely for being unable to verbalize anything at all. But this lent her long-anticipated (and in some quarters, hoped-for) death a drama no less compelling than theirs. The state in her case decided to execute (and an execution it was) a woman who suffered an attack that rendered her seemingly defenseless and voiceless for the last 15 years. Yet her vulnerable humanity will continue to scream louder than any voice for the truth and justice and humanity of which she was deprived by the cruelty and pitilessness of an unhearing world.

Unlike Christ or Socrates, Terri Schiavo was not afforded a trial in which she could participate or even be represented by her own lawyer. Oh, yes, there were the appeals and more appeals, but Terri was not there, could not speak, could not testify. Her husband, the only one present when she suffered the attack that deprived her lungs of oxygen, damaged her brain and allegedly left her mindless and voiceless, controlled the legal proceedings. The legal maneuvers and ritualistic denials of appeals had an air of unreality and doom. All of her decisions were being made by an estranged spouse with suspect motives under the mantle of judicial legitimacy. Doctors and lawyers and judges were engaged to decide her fate, but blinded themselves to the facts. The mockery of justice and the indignity attending the deaths of Jesus Christ and Socrates, the hopelessness and defenselessness of these men in the face of calculated and remorseless State murder, has nothing over the case of Terri Schiavo.

For those who know of her suffering and stand in her shadow unable to help, this has been an unbearable sentence of death.

Unlike Christ and Socrates, Terri Schiavo was not marched off to the site of her execution. The movie sensation last year was “The Passion of the Christ,” a film created to tell the story of the torture and murder of Jesus Christ. Scenes of flogging and being refused water on the via Dolorosa were vividly brought to life as concrete examples of unbearable, unimaginable suffering. Terri Schiavo was unable to march to her fate, unable to bear any cross. But can one imagine more suffering than the case of a woman, a living breathing human being, who was intentionally deprived of food and water for weeks while America’s courts committed slow motion murder of an utterly innocent human being right in front of our eyes?

During the ordeal, many supporters of Terri Schiavo wondered, Why isn't someone in power doing something? Why doesn’t the governor issue an executive order, a pardon, a reprieve, send in the National Guard if necessary? None of that was possible, or so we were told.

A last ditch effort was organized by those loyal to Socrates while he sat, a man condemned, awaiting the execution of a death penalty his friends found unthinkable. Rejecting the plan of escape hatched by his loyal old friend Crito, Socrates decided to accept the death sentence handed-down at his trial, consuming the poison hemlock drink; submitting despite the monstrous injustice of an innocent and great man being put to death. At trial, Socrates had given a detailed and highly complex explanation for his moral choice to accept his death sentence, comprising his commitment to the law, his loyalty to Athens, his attachment to his Athenian students, the unseemliness of an old man on-the-run in a foreign country, and above all his longstanding conviction that there is a higher reality and an afterlife for which he yearned desperately. His defense at trial was highly spirited and aggressive, motivated not by a desire to extend his own temporal existence but to prevent an injustice for which his vicious Athenian accusers would suffer eternally.

Unlike Socrates, Terri Schiavo cannot mount any defense in words but she has supporters as well. Why do they passively accept the court order to remove the feeding tube that will culminate in the monstrous and completely avoidable death of an innocent woman? They battled furiously in the courts to preserve her life, ultimately failing. If not verbally, has Terri Schiavo been speaking to us in some other way? Perhaps she is silently teaching the same lesson given by Jesus and Socrates by compelling us to contemplate the fact that laws are only man-made and if life is to have meaning and value there must be something that transcends life, from which all of life’s meaning and value are derived.

To a corrupt nation, Terri Schiavo is a living, breathing, thinking, willing, loving rebuke and provocation. She exposes all that is worst in us, the lawlessness, crassness, hard-heartedness, and viciousness that we see almost everywhere around us. In her silence she elegantly refutes the shameless fraud of the bioethics experts, the callousness of the Death Doctors and the Right-to-Die enthusiasts, the tyranny of an unchecked judiciary, the utter depravity of the secular humanists. In her debilitated state, nearly squeezed dry of life, she fills the world with her voiceless eloquence.

One last observation now that she has died. Due to the pall of unreality enveloping these events, those actively witnessing Terri Schiavo’s struggle cannot but feel a deep unease and conflictedness, sensing that on the one hand the world ought to have come to a dead stop until this immense evil was undone, and feeling on the other hand that her progression toward death was inexorable--that the forces of death were not about to halt for even a second, and we are utterly powerless to intervene. This state of unsettledness reveals to us that we, not Terri Schiavo, are the ones in a “locked-in” state, with minds and wills imprisoned in paralyzed bodies, powerless to find the right words and actions to effectively intervene or cry for help, unable to prevent the monstrous torture-murder occurring right in front of our eyes.

CSI: CBS SERIES INTERRUPTUS

2004-11-19T14:50:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

"The Wrong Producer, at the Wrong Time, and the Wrong Place"
In a welcome and long-awaited demonstration of corporate accountability, CBS News announced it has fired the producer responsible for interrupting one of the most watched television series in America. Approaching the climactic final moments, a CBS producer in the news division cut away to cover the "termination" of another drama, this one played-out on the world stage, the long-awaited political "death" and "burial" of one of the world’s most prominent leaders.

The network source explained CBS News deeply apologized for breaking into the television event to which so many viewers have become addicted, and recognized that it outraged many who had expected an uninterrupted viewing of this top-rated production.

"An overly aggressive CBS News producer jumped the gun with a report that should have been offered at a different hour," the network spokesperson explained. "We sincerely regret the error." The Viacom-owned network refused to comment on the dismissal report appearing on the web site of Broadcasting and Cable, a trade publication.

Yes, the preceding is a mock news story. No, the broadcast series is not CSI. CBS really fired the news producer who interrupted the conclusion of CSI to cover Arafat’s death, but it never fired the producer, or anchor, we are talking about. The leader being "buried" in our story was not Arafat. Those harmed were not viewers of a fictional crime series. The people CBS cut away to, in order to broadcast a "burial," were not the Palestinians. CBS never issued a genuine apology for interrupting this particular event.

The crime story we are talking about, known as RatherGate, consisted of unfounded allegations that George W. Bush failed to honorably fulfill his obligations and follow orders during his Vietnam War-era military service. The counterfeit CBS "60 Minutes" story assembled obviously forged National Guard documents supplied by a highly unstable source together with unfounded accounts from discredited individuals with a self-professed motivation to undermine President Bush’s re-election effort.

In response to "60 Minutes," Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, condemned the story: "55 days before an election," remarked Bartlett, "partisan Democrats are recycling the very same charges we hear every time President Bush runs for reelection. It is dirty politics."

Thus the "production" we’re concerned with was the 2004 presidential campaign in which CBS produced and directed a fraudulent "crime show" consisting of transparently forged documents and obviously faked evidence.

And we’re talking about CBS cutting away from a "long-running series" that has lasted over 200 years, namely, the quadrennial election of a United States president.

Just as CBS cut away at the end of CSI, so at the decisive moment did it interrupt the latest production in the presidential election series to promote a phony story about George W. Bush’s military service.

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Coinciding with the Labor Day kick-off of the campaign, CBS’s "60 Minutes" aired a segment on September 8, 2004 that dominated the news during a critically important period when President Bush and his presidential rival Sen. John Kerry should have been debating issues of genuine national interest and import. CBS interrupted to pursue the 2004 elect-Kerry-political-agenda of Dan Rather and Company. Without the comfort of knowing that he had the support needed at every level of CBS corporate leadership, Rather and his producer would never have felt emboldened to hijack a presidential election.

Finally, CBS cut away in order to advance-broadcast the "burial" of the American president, George W. Bush, not the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

The real affront is CBS’s failure to take responsibility for subverting the electoral process by interposing fabricated evidence of George W. Bush’s purported violation of military orders while in the Air National Guard. This was nothing less than a last minute attempt by CBS to steal a presidential election.

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The fact is, we’ve never seen CSI and could not care less whether this or any other CBS show is interrupted or even permanently canceled, although we’re sure lots of its fans care very passionately.

We exercise our right not to watch any shows on CBS, except to the extent necessary to monitor and report on the consistent treason of that and the other Big Three news networks. The three networks are doing everything they can to defeat Republican candidates, undermine morale at home, demoralize American troops fighting in Iraq and give aid and comfort to America’s terrorist enemies—all in order to sabotage the overall war on terror as part of the elite media’s radical anti-American agenda.

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CBS News did fire the producer who elected to interrupt the last five minutes of its hit crime drama CSI.

But it was the Wrong Producer, at the Wrong Time, and the Wrong Place.

CBS News thought it was being responsible in immediately firing the producer who interrupted CSI. What we derive from this firing, however, is not an acknowledgement that CBS is responsive to the expressed outrage of the audience for its dramatic series CSI, but rather, by stark contrast, CBS’s utter lack of responsibility to the American electorate for interrupting a series of presidential elections running for over 200 years. It is the American public that CBS slapped in the face. This is the same American public from which the network receives its right to broadcast on the public’s airwaves. By foot-dragging in failing to promptly apologize and take immediate corrective action by firing both Dan Rather, the producers and the executives responsible for one of the greatest frauds in American media history—attempting to "fix" a presidential election—CBS demonstrated its contempt for the American people. Adding insult to injury, CBS and much of the rest of the liberal mainstream media committed an even greater outrage: they tried to justify this attempted subversion of American democracy by claiming that the forged documents and allegations based on purported eyewitness participant accounts were "fake but true."

Legally, morally, logically and journalistically this claim is as specious as it is arrogant and contemptuous. By exhibiting a fierce recidivistic determination to continue to perpetrate this massive hoax, rather than sincere remorse, the network merits the harshest available punishment.

Just as the al Qaeda terrorists and radical Islamists are said to have hijacked the Muslim religion, and just as Yasser Arafat is considered to have hijacked the Palestinian people, so CBS created a phony crime drama in an attempt to hijack an American election. The network’s purpose was to defeat a Republican president and elect his Democratic Party rival, John Kerry. The CBS hoax merits comparison with the former two hijackings because America, as preeminent superpower and the universally acknowledged leader of the free world, is in the midst of a worldwide war on terrorism the continued prosecution of which was the main subject of contention in the just-transpired presidential election.

The prompt termination of the CBS producer demonstrates how quickly the network can act when an employee’s actions are contrary to CBS’s interests.

By contrast, CBS's inaction in RatherGate, its propagation of the fraudulent "60 Minutes" National Guard story, demonstrates the inverted priorities of the network and the contempt of its leading news executives, producers and anchors for America, its military and its voters. CBS interrupted the national life of the country for weeks at the peak of the presidential election drama in order to pursue its political agenda of attempting to manipulate an election. In perpetrating the greatest election hoax in history, and for its contumacy and temerity in persisting with the "forged but true" approach to the story, CBS itself as a licensed broadcast entity is worthy of nothing less than prompt termination by the FCC.

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Kerry and Teresa: Suicide Pact

2004-11-02T06:28:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

More than any other person, John Kerry is responsible for the false image of Vietnam Veterans as dysfunctional misfits. Kerry betrayed all of us when he returned from Vietnam." - Retired U.S. Navy Seal captain with service in Vietnam, John Bailey

John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry had each warned they'd hit back. Kerry threw down the gauntlet, "Bring it on," and Teresa threatened she'd use her hundreds of millions if they went after husband John for the wrong reasons.

Well, they did; so he did, and she did. They all did. So now it's war, war! It's 1971 all over again. It's war. Except this time he's got her out there, under the radar, and now she's doing the dirty work. She and the Brown Shirts...no, the Brown Book guys. They know where the dirt is. The Brown Book guys, the private investigators for Kerry's campaign, they've got the dirt on all of 'em. --Oh, they'll use it, they'll use it. So Teresa'll go out there and stick the knife in for John. Stick it in and twist it. And the Brown Book guys, whoa!, let loose they'll dig holes so deep, you can drive Teresa's five SUVs into 'em. She's diggin' up trash, doin' the dirty deeds.

And John, he's smelling...eh, smellin' sweet as a rose. Sweet as a bloomin' rose. All the while, she's pluggin' 'em, really pluggin' 'em. Kerry, he sends Teresa out. And she's goin' from town meetin' to town meetin' savagin' the bastards. And the Brown Shirts...eh, Brown Book guys, they're hittin' 'em, scarin' em with the dirt they're diggin' up. And the media, now we got the real bums, Laurence O'Donnell types, the absolute lowest out there, callin' this guy O'Neill, "Liar, liar, liar." Everybody in the media's out there, shillin' for Kerry. Sayin' it's a lie, all made up.

So Kerry got it under control. Totally under control.

Listen to what she's out there doin', this Teresa; they call her, Dr. T. She's a doll.

She goes to all these "Town Hall" meetin's and "Health Care Forums" and it's 1971 all over again. She's poundin' away at the Vietnam vets like it's party time. I mean, bash-em-in-the-head Party Time. I mean, she's out there, doin' Kerry's dirty work, sayin' the same things now he used to say back in 1971. Remember this testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? Kerry explained,

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the
feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped…I understand 57 percent of all those entering the VA hospitals talk
about suicide. Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care.

See, it's a "suicide pact" between John Kerry and Teresa. They want to brand all the vets and Swiftees as suicidal misfits, vagrants, drug addicts and criminals.

Back then, Kerry and a bunch of other anti-American activist vets, they called themselves "Winter Soldiers," most of 'em impostors that never went to Vietnam or never were combat vets in the first place or never did what they said, or saw what they described. But they were talkin' all this trash about atrocities and babykillers and torturers and murderers--that's what Kerry called the buddies he left behind back in 1971. And then when he came back, he said America was creatin' hordes of em, millions of "monsters" and homeless and drug addicts and murderers, lots of 'em commitin' suicide. Vietnam vets commitin' suicide in droves. Tens of thousands of 'em. And all out on the streets, derelicts and homeless, drug addicts and mentally ill. Here's Kerry's 1971 testimony to that Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speakin' to Sen. Symington,

Senator Symington: There have been many reports of widespread use of drugs by U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. I might add I was in Europe last week and the growth of that problem was confirmed on direct questioning of people in the military. How serious is the problem and to what do you attribute it?
Mr. Kerry: The problem is extremely serious. It is serious in very many different ways. I believe two Congressmen today broke a story. I can't remember their names. There were 35,000 or some men, heroin addicts that were back. The problem exists for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the emptiness. It is the only way to get through it. A lot of guys, 60, 80 percent stay stoned 24 hours a day just to get through the Vietnam- Senator
Symington [INCREDULOUS]: You say 60 to 80 percent?

Mr. Kerry: Sixty to 80 percent is the figure used that try something, let's say, at one point. Of that, I couldn't give you a figure of habitual smokers, let's say, of pot, and I certainly couldn't begin to say how many are hard drug addicts, but I do know that the problem for the returning veteran is acute because we have, let's say, a veteran picks up at $12 habit in Saigon. He comes back to this country and the
moment he steps off an airplane that same habit costs him some $90 to support. With the state of the economy, he can't get a job. He doesn't earn money. He turns criminal or just finds his normal sources and in a sense drops out.

The thing about it is, it's all fabrication. Not a word of it true, not a word. See how Kerry first says 60 to 80 per cent stay stoned 24 hours a day, and then a minute later, as soon as you challenge him, he collapses like a house of cards, and then its reduced to, they might "try something…at one point." That’s just how he got his medals, this masquerader.

He got the whole country believin' that Vietnam vets are all degenerates, criminals, drug-crazed, babykillers, murderers, psychopaths and suicidal. Tens of thousands committed suicide, he and Teresa told everyone. More than 60,000 Vietnam vets committed suicide.

And it's all untrue. Pure falsehood. Kerry's the person who started this stuff, just invented it. It's all been refuted, the claims are baseless, and the studies appeard in medical research journals.

Vietnam vets, they've been followed-up year after year. Published by the CDC. They did a huge study of Vietnam vets. Turns out, in every category, from suicide to homicide, from drugs to thugs, from homeless to jobless, Vietnam vets are no higher, and in most cases their numbers are lower, than everybody else. They've been surveyed, too. And they're livin' lives equal or better. They're happier in their marriages and jobs, more are married and have jobs to be happy about, they achieve greater success and by comparison their crime rates and homelessness rates are lower than the average.

Kerry and now his wife. They did a number on the vets. A real number.

Homeless and suicidal, homeless and suicidal, homeless and suicidal. And now, in the movies and tv, and books and magazines and newspapers, that's all you hear, homeless and suicidal, homeless and suicidal.

That Kerry's somethin', isn't he? Built his whole career on savagin' his fellow vets, fellow soldiers. Can you imagine that? Made a name for himself, testimony before the Senate, denouncin' the guys he just served alongside in Vietnam, and the guys in the North Vietnamese prison camps. Can you imagine that? Just denounced them all as war criminals.

You've gotta see the publications documenting this stuff. Everything Kerry and Teresa say against the Vietnam vets is a vicious slander. Vietnam vets are more normal than the rest of us as a group. Better workers. Better fathers. Healthier. Saner. Live longer. Better in every way. Just read that CDC study, the Burkett book, "Stolen Valor," the online articles by Michael Kelley, a decorated vet.

Now you've got these Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They appear in 2004 and tell people, It's all calumny, we didn't commit atrocities, war crimes; we weren't babykillers and torturers and murderers. The Swift Boat guys say, 'The guys who threw away their medals, and the Winter Soldiers, they're just impostors, frauds, outright liars.'

And they say, Kerry's a fraud, too. Phony as a three dollar bill. He faked official reports to get his medals, didn't deserve 'em. The Swift Boat vets documented every instance. They show that he wrote the after-action reports himself and used trickery to get those medals, used 'em to get himself an early out after just four months with three fake Purple Hearts, and none of those "wounds" needed more than a band-aid; no blood, just boo-boos. Same with the other medals. Proved it all in O'Neill's book, "Unfit for Command."

So what does Kerry do? Him and Teresa? -- One, they do these Brown Book guys, lots of PIs diggin' up dirt on all these Swift Boat vets. And, two, she goes out there and starts stickin' it to 'em. Stickin' the knife in and twistin' it.

She's out there, this Teresa, and she's puttin' out the same stuff about the suicides and the homeless. -- No, I'm not kiddin'.

Here's how she does it. Goes to a Kerry campaign Health Care Forum, mostly with women worried about health care. She starts with the numbers. Tells these women who don't know any better, and the Kerry media flacks, about the health care she did for her husband. She tells them how there are all these psych patients who need help. And how many are Vietnam vets. And how there are more Vietnam vets who committed suicide than died in the whole war. -- How many died in Vietnam? -- Oh, over 50,000; maybe 58,000. -- Yep. That's right. And she says more Vietnam vets died from suicide than were killed over there, more than all the names on the Vietnam monument on the mall in DC. That's right. And she brings up that other counterfeit story about Vietnam vets, how they're all homeless. In Los Angeles, you know, how there are tens of thousands of them flooding the streets, and on the public dole, vagrants and derelicts and homeless--all Vietnam vets.

And it's a myth, all a myth. Disproven long ago by a giant CDC study. It's right there on the Internet, lot's of published reports and analyses and studies. There's that book, too, by Burkett... "Stolen Valor." Documents how it's all a fraud, invented by an young and opportunistic John Kerry, and then picked-up along the way by a few Jayson Blair-type journalists and unscrupulous psychologists to make their careers on the carcases of dead soldiers. But it's all untrue, complete fiction.

Yet she's out there, and shovelin' more and more of it to the press and the public at these Town Hall meetings. Listen to this. This is Teresa at one of her Health Forums. Listen,

Most people don’t realize this, but in Los Angeles today, or [Los Angeles] County, there are about 49,000 homeless Vietnam veterans; 49,000 homeless Vietnam veterans.
And you know why they’re [homeless]? Their problems were never resolved: the hurt, the psychic damage, of having been in a war that showed us…whatever horrible losses and horrors they saw. The inability of our country to deal with them then; and there they are. And more Vietnam veterans have died by their own hands since they came back, than the 50,000 to 60,000 who died in Vietnam. So
these are some of the things we haven’t known how to, sometimes been positioned to do and sometimes … do something about it.... So we have a responsibility....

Believe me. That's a c-span transcript. -- Sure, it's still there on the c-span website, her talk in Lawrence County, PA at a shelter there.

And this trash talkin’ wasn’t just dreamed-up in her head. It came from Kerry, where else? And she repeated it over and over.

There she is again, on Hardball, the MSNBC show. Listen to this, the transcript from that clown, Chris Matthews, who'll do anything to encourage bad-mouthing of soldiers and vets:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about the other thing about him, about Vietnam. I guess the one thing that your campaign and he wants us to know about him is that he served the country. But there's a down side to war. We are reading about people who are coming back from Iraq who are emotionally upset, to say the least. There's flashbacks and things like that. Living with John Kerry, do you live at all that memory of Vietnam with him in any traumatic way?

HEINZ KERRY: Not in a specific way of saying people getting -- get -- flashbacks Agent Orange, or the thousands and thousands of homeless out there who have become alcoholic or drug dependent because of Vietnam. You know, unfinished business, unfinished therapy. I think Los Angeles alone has 49,000 homeless Vietnam veterans, today.

That’s pure invention. There are no 49,000 homeless Vietnam vets in LA. She and Kerry just made-up all this stuff out of whole cloth, to smear all the vets in the minds of Americans, to discredit them all over again now that the Swift Boat vets are exposing Kerry as an impostor and a fraud.

Once the Swift Boat vets exposed Kerry, his numbers started droppin'. Like a rock. So they called-in these Kerry Brown Shirts... eh, Brown Book guys, and all the while they're diggin'. They started to pick these Swift Boat guys off. Attack pieces on Corsi. Even got Admiral Zumwalt's son. -- Oh, yeah, he was one of the Swift Boat vets who denounced Kerry as a phony and a liar. Turned out, ten, fifteen years ago he had attempted suicide. -- Yeah, believe it? Suicide. So these Brown Book guys, they dug it up, and smeared him. Kerry couldn't answer the charges in O'Neill's book, so they smeared the guy, sent a little message to the New York Times, Media Matters, the New York Daily News, and they ran with it. Oh, yes. And that little message said only, Brown Book. Brown Book. That's it. These guys are A-1 at intimidation, A-1.

Sen. John Kerry called a member of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth over the weekend to try to reason with him over the group's attacks on his record. But fellow Democrats aren't hesitating to try far more aggressive tactics. A group of Democratic loyalists is compiling incriminating dossiers on the members of the veteran group - and they sent us a preview of what might be in store for Swift Boat activist James Zumwalt, son of illustrious Adm. Elmo Zumwalt - and it isn't pretty.
Zumwalt "attempted to kill himself with an overdose of prescription drugs," after the murder of his ex-wife's fiance, John Kowalczyk,
according to the dossier, which is footnoted to news sources, and was "convicted of reckless driving after chasing Kowalczyk at a high speed on the highway." Zumwalt stepped into the line of fire when he testified with the controversial Swift vets at the National Press Club in Washington last May.

Where they goin' with this? Oh, there's no end to it! Right now, they've got bums out there already savagin' the Iraq War soldiers -- That's right. I lie not. I'm sayin' there are phonies out there every day sowin' the seeds and rippin' into the boys over there in Iraq right now. -- That's right. Talkin' about the soldiers over there now, how there commintin' suicide right and left. -- No, no. Not just Abu Ghraib prison. I mean Kerry talk, Kerry suicide talk. Oh, they're killin' themselves left and right over there. And soon there'll be PTSD all over the place over in Iraq, too. Absolutely. They've learned, so now we have Son-of-Kerry. Sproutin' up all over the place. Remember that Chris Matthews interview, where Teresa talked about all the non-existent homeless vets in LA. Well, Matthews, he’s one of the spineless and malicious media hacks carryin' water for those who slander the Swiftees. Now he's promotin’ this business about all the Iraqi forces that’ll come back crazed and suicidal. Here's what he said to Teresa in that interview,

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about the other thing about him, about Vietnam. I guess the one thing that your campaign and he wants us to know about him is that he served the country. But there's a down side to war. We are reading about people who are coming back from Iraq who are emotionally upset, to say the least.

That’s right. "Here you go again." Anything these guys can do to trash the military, these guys over there givin’ their lives to protect Chris Matthews, and he’s downin’ ‘em. Can you believe it?. But he’s not the only one. That pair of blockheads, the financial husband and wife team… -- That’s it. The Dolans. Listen to the hatchet job they did on the vets; it’s a long one, but listen:

KEN DOLAN, CNNfn ANCHOR, DOLANS UNSCRIPTED: All right, listen to me. Let's cut to the chase here. Forget all this fancy television intro stuff, OK? I'm a Vietnam veteran. Let's go past that. But the reason I say this - because let's forget about Vietnam; it's 30 years ago, OK? Let's talk right now what's going on in Iraq. Should we be there? Should we - I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know the answer to that. But I am smart enough to know - and I think our
guest agrees, and I don't know. We'll find out from Rieckhoff. I believe, if we're going to be in there, let's do it right and let's support our troops. That's what I say.

DARIA DOLAN: And let us know what's happening to our troops. And the gentleman joining us right now spent 10 months in Iraq. He's
the founder of Operation Truth. He is a U.S. Army reservist in the National Guard, Lieutenant Paul Rieckhoff. Paul, thanks for joining us.

PAUL RIECKHOFF, FOUNDER, OPERATION TRUTH: Thank you for having me here today….
DARIA DOLAN: And let us know what's happening to our troops. And the gentleman joining us right now spent 10 months in Iraq. He's the founder of Operation Truth. He is a U.S. Army reservist in the National Guard, Lieutenant Paul Rieckhoff….

RIECKHOFF: I think our country has solved some of the problems with body armor, with some of the other deficiencies. We've still got a long way to go, and post-traumatic stress disorder, the psychological damage that these guys are coming home with hasn't even begun to be addressed yet.
KEN DOLAN: Well, I'll tell you one thing, Rieckhoff.
DARIA DOLAN: No, that will be several years before that shows….

RIECKHOFF: We need to talk about the war.
DARIA DOLAN: Well, because, if you look at the Vietnam vet era, most of the homeless that are on the streets today, with the mental disorders and everything else, are Vietnam vets.
KEN DOLAN: Two hundred-fifty thousand people. OpTruth.org.

This Rieckhoff’s a prize too, isn’t he. – Oh, there are lot’s of ‘em. Little John Kerrys, all these imitators wanna get into the papers and on tv, make a buck off their dead buddies, and, just maybe, get some little political job out of it. Kerry in 1971 all over again.

There’s another one you’ll just love. A group called "Veterans for Kerry." Not "for America," but for Kerry. Held a meetin', broadcast on c-span, September 12, 2004 and downed our boys and girls in Iraq. One of their stooges, Medina, he’s out there doin’ it all the time. Here’s one of his sessions:

Those who take their own lives because they are unable to come to terms with their experiences in Iraq are not counted. Ivan Medina spoke of how hundreds of American soldiers are committing suicide in Iraq, and when they return to America. Also forgotten are the 7000 plus US soldiers who have been hospitalized or are suffering severe mental problems.

How about this one, a caller to the Larry King Live show where the guest was that comedian, Bill Maher on September 13, 2004, the paranoid conspiracy theorist who told Howard Dean the other day on his show that there was an immense conspiracy throughout the entire health care industry, especially the drug companies, to withhold cures from Americans, to keep them just sick enough with chronic diseases to make them dependent on doctors and hospitals and drugs to keep them alive. Well they got this call from a like-minded joker from Columbus, Ohio:

LARRY KING, HOST: Columbus, Ohio. Hello.

CALLER: …why are the American people so blind to this [Iraq] war turning into Vietnam? 26 of our troops committed suicide. What's that about?

And how about this letter I saved, a Letter to the Editor of a New York newspaper:

As a politically savvy person, I have been listening to and sorting out the vast innuendoes that our illustrious media has been spewing out about the admirable John Kerry. This Swift Boat for Truth campaign has certainly accomplished what it was out to accomplish. They have smeared an admirable and honorable man who is running his heart out to become our next president.

The majority of veterans who returned from Vietnam suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is evident in the majority of these hateful group of liars. Kerry, who fought bravely and put his life on the line and volunteered for service twice, is being attacked from a group of men who are definitely associated with our corrupt, inept, lying president. They are Bush's trump card and are closely associated with Karl Rove, Roy Hoffman, Merrie Spaeth and the rest of those
corrupt Texas Republicans who have funded the SBFT campaign.

Four years of this illegitimate administration is quite enough. It's time for a real commander in chief step up to the plate and that man is John F. Kerry. It's time for the media to stop feeding on this garbage and get back to the real issues.
This is what the election is all about. Please remember to cast your vote for John Kerry Nov. 2.

I’m tellin’ ya, they’re crawlin’ out of the woodwork. All these Kerry wannbees. Haters of the American military. Kerry and Teresa got this all ginned-up again, just like 1971.

Teresa knows exactly what she’s doin’. It’s the hatchet job. The Kerry hatchet job. The low blow. The dirty trick. The stunt. Those Swift Boat vets are exposin’ him for the phony he is, and he’s got no answer. So all he can do is smear the vets and get out the Brown Book guys to dig up dirt and defame 'em. -- Oh, Teresa knows exactly what she’s doin’. You can be sure of that. She says it herself. Listen to this, from her Barbara Walters interview on 20/20, May 7, 2004:

"I'm not a loose cannon. I know what I'm saying. And I don't venture into territory I don't know."

She and Kerry know this path. They've travelled it before. Stick it to the vets, the boys still fighting over there, and the ones who've done the job and have come back home. Ridicule 'em and make sure the public treats 'em like dirt, like damaged goods. Do it all over again, smear 'em, say over and over again, they're crazed killers, abusers, torturers, monsters, psychotic, suicidal, killers of women and children over there. That's the only way Kerry can win.

BACK TO TERESA ARTICLES HOMEPAGE

Kerry's Prior Restraint: Teresa's Little Nuts

2004-11-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

Three groups of recent press accounts offer an idea of what to expect if Sen. John Kerry wins the presidential election and his wife Teresa becomes First Lady of the United States. "Prior restraint" may shed its legal significance and become a description of how Kerry handles his wife.

TEMPORARY SUBSTITUTE FOR PSYCH MEDS

When the wife of John Kerry, leading contender for the presidency of the United States, has to be physically restrained from kissing another man on one night, and then on another night, while the couple is on their way home, again has to be restrained by her husband from hopping into a cab with a group of single reporters, pressuring them, "Where's the bar? Where's the bar?"--all under the watchful eye of an accompanying reporter--you know the campaign has a serious problem.

As reported by the AP's Nedra Pickler, the presidential pretender was fine dining with his wife at a leading Ketchum, Idaho restaurant when Kerry was asked to join a just-married couple's party out on the restaurant's terrace and extend his congratulations to the newlyweds. The Kerrys own a vacation home in Ketchum and were there, taking a bit of time off from the campaign, getting a bit of R&R.

The attending reporters who stayed behind, Pickler included, were treated to an expansive Teresa expansively imitating the relaxing sound of rushing water as a thoroughly satisfying substitute for psychotherapy and psychotropic medication, explaining, "When I get here, and I listen to the river.... That's all I need for therapy. No doctors, no drugs, just the water." (Which begs the question, What about when Teresa can't manage to be in Idaho?)

When Sen. Kerry returned to their table, his wife teased him about having kissed the bride, and then asked, seemingly innocently, if she might kiss the groom.

While in the company of a gaggle of reporters, and not wanting to seem anything less than the perfectly politically correct and perfectly liberated husband, Kerry replied, "Absolutely," assuming she was joking. Added Kerry nonchalantly, "You can do whatever you want."

Kerry may have been joking, but Teresa wasn't. Or, at least she was unconcerned about the impression on the amazed reporters when she actually rose from her seat and headed toward the reception to get her kiss.

At that point, according to Pickler, Kerry grew concerned and had to physically restrain her. Even then, Heinz Kerry was not to be deterred. She tried to bull her way toward the wedding party. Kerry grabbed her hand and pulled her back, while she laughed and uninhibitedly insisted, "I want to kiss the groom, I want to kiss the groom!"

The other incident requiring restraint occurred as the couple was emerging from a Boston restaurant not far from their home. Teresa insisted that they walk home and, as the reporter describes it, danced a jig to entertain the assembled media and onlookers. Then,

The couple recognized a few young reporters in one passing cab, and Heinz Kerry leaned in the window playfully asking, "Where's the bar? Where's the bar?" as if she were going to join them. Her husband finally pulled her away by the hand with a broad smile on his face.

What, we may well ask, are we to expect if John Kerry is elected president, with Teresa unrestrained, released from her "handlers" and no longer motivated to be on her best and most self-restrained pre-election behavior?

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

DR. T

Having studied New Age Medicine, Teresa Heinz Kerry has convinced herself and husband John Kerry that she is a health expert. Our analysis of her ideas on health and their influence on her husband's health care policies is discussed in an earlier article in this series, entitled TeresaCare: Department of Wellness.

Known to staff, friends and family as "Dr. T," Teresa frequently dispenses New Age remedies and health advice to others, and claims to have diagnosed her husband's prostate cancer, even though she relied on a highly unreliable PSA test. John Kerry's physician also hopes to share a bit of the credit for making the diagnosis.

To prove to the world that she really knows her stuff when it comes to medicine, Dr. T not only lectures physician groups but recently shared her remedy for arthritis, consisting of gin-soaked raisins,

You get some gin and get some white raisins — and only white raisins — and soak them in the gin for two weeks. Then eat nine of the raisins a day....

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

TERESA’S LITTLE NUTS, LITTLE PINKIES

Teresa might have needed quite a few of those raisins. It might have been expected that there would be a bit of friction when John Kerry and Teresa Heinz married, each bringing children from prior marriages.
Kerry came to the wedding with two grown daughters, Teresa brought three grown sons. Friction quickly ensued, with Kerry’s two daughters vying with Teresa for their father’s attention,

There was family friction. It centered particularly on Teresa Heinz and the Kerry daughters. Little dust-ups -- Alex or Vanessa calling after Teresa's bedtime, showing up unannounced when there was company -- would escalate. The macro issue was that all parties expected to be Kerry's first priority. He would always drop everything for Alex and Vanessa who were 18 and 21 at the time of the marriage. But if Heinz expected something from Kerry and didn't get it, she would become wounded.

In connection with her step-daughters, her behavior appears not only needy but transparently manipulative and infantile.

"I'm a real needy person," Heinz says, "and that's because of loss. ... It's like when you say to a child you're going to do something and you don't, they're very threatened. For me, it's a loss.

"It's hard," she says, referring to her relationships with Kerry's daughters. "When they want their father, they want their father, same as I want their father when I want their father, because I don't have much."

Heinz Kerry explains that she may have gone into the marriage and the step-parental role suffering from overly high expectations. Nowadays she appears to reproach herself for treating Alex and Vanessa as if they were human, rather than house pets,

"Because I thought, I love kids, kids love me, I’ll be fine. Baloney." She says that a friend gave her some useful advice: "You have to treat stepchildren like pets. You’re nice to them, but you don’t get too close, or they chew you up. Well, I did it the other way."

Word is, Kerry’s daughters refer to their step-mother in revenge as "step-money."

Then again, by Teresa’s own account, her own sons consider her their "witchy mother."

Consumed by a supposed loneliness and racked with self-pity, she explains to a Washington Post reporter the craving she has for attention,

Kerry has plenty for himself, she says. He has his daughters, his mother, three siblings, dozens of cousins. "When I go to Boston, he has family and friends and everything," she says. "I have to make everything up. He's got all his classmates he went to school with, they're all in America. I have no classmates. I have no cousins."

In yet another of Teresa's bizarre characterizations of her family, this one during an interview with Oprah's protege Dr. Phil, Teresa calls the babies she miscarried her little "pinkies." Nobody can blame her for feeling attached to these lost babies she failed to bring to term, but doesn't referring to them publicly as her darling pinkies, as one might refer to a collection of dolls, just make you want to cringe?

BACK TO TERESA ARTICLES HOMEPAGE

Eros Colored Glasses: Our First Award

2004-10-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

Thanks to BEAUTIFUL ATROCITIES™ for granting us our first award as "BEAUTIFUL ATROCITIES Site of the Week," and to Editors in Pajamas for recommending us to their readers, saying of Eros Colored Glasses, "There is some wonderful writing and analysis going on there."

TeresaCare: Department of Wellness

2004-10-28T01:27:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

This is such a powerful moment for me. -- Teresa Heinz Kerry, Democratic Convention, July 2004 Speech

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s health care plan, representing a vast 1.5 trillion dollar increase in costs billable to the American taxpayer over the next ten years, depends for many of its bold new health-related policy initiatives on the advice and counsel of the candidate’s sharp-tongued philanthropist and food fortune heiress wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Does America know what it’s getting itself in for?

With the death of her first senator husband, John Heinz III, Teresa Heinz Kerry found herself a billionairess in control of the Heinz Family Endowments one of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations dispensing charitable millions to fund radical environmental causes, New Age Medicine, gay rights advocacy and a wide variety of education projects.

Teresa assumes the role of an expert in operating these vast charities even though she had no formal education, training or experience in any related field prior to assuming the mantle of leadership after her first husband’s death. Prior to that she was a housewife and, by her own account, for all practical purposes took no significant role in managing the family business interests or the foundations.

With her marriage to Sen. John Kerry in 1995, after having re-invented herself as a major philanthropist designing scientific, medical and social programs, Teresa parlayed her philanthropic credentials into becoming the presidential aspirant’s principal advisor on medical, environmental and education matters.

Writes Gail Sheehy in the pages of Mother Jones magazine:

John Kerry has not yet defined how he intends to include a prescription drug benefit in his health care plan, but his wife has seen her foundation's plan, HOPE, adopted by the state of Massachusetts, and she is developing similar plans for several other states.
"All that stuff is way ahead of my husband," [Teresa] says.

On September 8, 2004 in Greensboro, N.C., presidential candidate John Kerry formally unveiled his wife Teresa’s ultimate solution to America’s health care crisis: once elected president, the Kerry Administration will supersize the current Department of Health & Human Services bureaucracy by merging it with, or subsuming it under, a new Teresa-designed Department of Wellness. Bowing to his wife’s assertion of superior wisdom on matters medical, Kerry dutifully announced to the nation, "I intend to have not just a Department of Health and Human Services, but a Department of Wellness."

Teresianity: The Religion of Biological Determinism.

It is crucial in understanding Teresa Heinz Kerry and her public policy ambitions to grasp the fact that bodily health is at the very center of her thinking not only about personal physical and mental health but about human life and human behavior in general. At the root of her psychobiblical worldview is the notion that New Age Medicine and other marginal "holistic" practices will guarantee us all a utopian healthy, intelligent and moral society. New Ageisms infuse her speech and suffuse her thinking to such a degree that, as David Halbfinger of The New York Times reports, "She talks to bewildered audiences about tai chi, about 'embracing the tiger'." The would-be First Lady often drones on with Teresaisms such as, "I like to nurture people, I like to enable." Teresa's odoriferous brew, according to Deborah Orin of the New York Post, consists of a jumbled amalgam of "feminism, globalism and New Age lingo." As the Daily News' Helen Kennedy observes, Teresa "speaks slowly and quietly, often saying heartfelt New-Agey things that sound alien on the stump, like predicting a coming 'time of wellness'."

According to Heinz Kerry, we Americans are ignorant of the fact that, in order to be productive, we must all practice the rituals of wellness and prevention. Her notion of these goes far beyond what Americans usually think of in terms of eating healthful foods, keeping our weight down, exercising, not smoking and the like. As with so many of her views on life and science, Teresa Heinz Kerry's notion of wellness and prevention derive from what she describes as her time as a youngster spent roaming the jungles and savannas of Africa.

The Atlantic Monthly's Michelle Cottle offers Teresa recounting how she "spent her childhood climbing guava trees, swimming in crocodile-infested rivers, and accompanying her father, a successful oncologist, on visits to impoverished villages in the bush."

In reality this cosseted and coddled daughter of Portuguese parents was living the proverbial colonial good life in pre-revolutionary Mozambique where the black oppressed were routinely and rigorously exploited as servants, often as near-slaves.

Here in America, Teresa has invented for herself a life story in which she depicts herself as liberator of the oppressed African masses, vanquisher of apartheid and reigning authority in world health and disease. Karen Tumulty of Time describes an alternative reality in which a young Teresa was to be seen in the Mozambican capital "playing tennis on the grass lawns of private clubs and spending her days sipping tea and coffee with her friends." Dennis B. Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette paints a portrait of a life with" servants, boarding schools and a big, rambling house near the water in the capital." We can only speculate about the education of this child of colonial Africa during the pre-Nazi and Nazi period. What we do know is that Teresa’s sense of the dependence of human life upon the occult life-enhancing powers of the pseudo-religion of wellness is not just some off-the-cuff incoherent noodling on her part, but appears to be a concentrated expression of Teresa’s fundamental philosophy of life, her mantra on all things health-related. This is a function of her apparent adherence to an even more deeply-rooted proto-fascist theory of biological determinism in fundamental conflict with the American belief in free will and individual moral responsibility. In Teresa's worldview, biological mechanisms determine who we are in the most fundamental sense: what we think and how we act and what we believe.

In line with this, she regularly castigates American health care providers and even openly humiliates her own physicians (as she did on a recently-aired C-span broadcast) for expressing insufficient interest in her pet theories of biological determinism such as putatively harmful estrogenic effects. Heinz Kerry regularly adopts medical fads, hunting and gathering pieces of utterly spurious medical data to support her patchwork notions frequently forgetting that what she said just moments earlier contradicts what she is saying now. This combination of intellectual lassitude and unwavering indifference to facts accounts for her recent embarrassment over accusing First Lady Laura Bush of never having held a job, and then just hours later having to apologize after being informed that, as is universally known, the present First Lady was a school teacher and librarian. It might also account for her criticizing the auto, home and plane industries while operating multiple SUVs, five stately homes and a private jet.

As often happens when Teresa recites her health care mantra during campaign stops and health forums open to the public, at a recent health care event reported-on by the AP, "She elicited chuckles from the crowd and her husband when she described the differences between women, who are driven by estrogen to ‘tend and mend,’ and men, who she said are driven by testosterone to 'fight or flight'."

Heinz Kerry’s biological determinism—her concept of the priority of the body, the physical, the biological—involves a thoroughgoing denial of those fundamental concepts of free will and individual responsibility utterly fundamental to Judeo-Christian America.

If you have a child who eats the wrong things, is denied adequate health care and is deprived of a stimulating environment, it follows of necessity that he will turn out to be a criminal or other form of psychopath, sociopath or mental defective, Teresa teaches. From this she believes it follows naturally that if society seriously intends to prevent criminality and all other forms of social pathology, then all we have to do is provide our children with the right nourishment and sunlight and stimulation—and, poof!, instantly you have healthy and well-adjusted children who grow into intelligent, law-abiding and well-adjusted adults.

For instance, in New Mexico last month, she promoted the Kerry health care plan explaining, according to an AP report, that "keeping children healthy will keep them off the streets and out of jails, 'Every child should have that great send off so they can blossom and become great Americans'." In Kolona, Iowa Teresa dilated on "John’s plan" explaining it will make all children "blossom" by assuring that:

the children put through school will have the same healthcare access, no matter who they are or where they come from, will have the same quality program from zero to 8; whether it’s means tested for someone who can pay all or part, or free for those who can’t. So that at the end of a school trajectory certainly by 8 years old, every American child has had the best that we collectively can give…to children, which is good health, good habits, strong brain development, strong social skills … we will have given them good beginnings. And let me just say that paying $10,000 or $12,000 full time for a kid who has nothing, is a lot cheaper, a lot kinder, and a lot smarter--also good economic policy-- instead of having them at $50,000 to $60,000 for life, as a young criminal, which is what’s happening in this country.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has thoroughly convinced herself that she has made a truly important and original discovery, completely oblivious to the fact that for hundreds of years innumerable snake oil salesman have been trying to pawn-off such panaceas and easy fixes in place of genuine, scientifically-based health and education practices and rigorous theories of criminal and moral responsibility both religious and philosophical.

She defines the choice Americans must make in the starkest possible terms: "If you don't focus on prevention and wellness, you die," she told a group at a health-related campaign event in Las Vegas on August 12, 2004. Heinz Kerry added without a touch of irony, "Wellness and prevention has to be No. 1 in my book. It's kinder to people. It's cheaper. It's affordable--and it's just a lot more fun."

Optimistic message: TeresaCare's a lot more fun; you follow its dictates, or you die.

Just the day before her Las Vegas appearance, live on CNN’s morning show, Heinz Kerry had beamed optimistically, "But coming from a third world country and a country that did not have either the resources or access to the kinds of things we have, and which is representative of most the world really, if you don't focus on prevention and wellness, you die, right?"

This is what Teresa Heinz Kerry has in mind when she promulgates her "holistic" health plans and practices. Not merely that they allegedly help this or that person, or might assist in preventing this or that disease. Rather that holistic healing has transcending, even transcendent value. TeresaCare has the transforming power of religion, the religion of Teresianity. New Age Medicine conceived as a low calorie religion substitute is the basis for her notion that our deficiencies in health care are responsible for preventing Americans from being "smart, well and happy." The health care plan designed by Teresa Heinz Kerry for a prospective Kerry Administration, she tells us, will immediately make "investments in our well-being" and prevent the many social and personal pathologies that restrain the individual and engulf the nations of the world. It is this global, holistic, New Age vision that portentously leads her to formulate for Kerry a health care plan in which a Department of Wellness will insure that no matter the cost, "from day one, every child will have access to healthcare;" or, more precisely, TeresaCare.

Even die-hard Kerry supporters such as Mickey Kaus were nonplused by candidate Kerry’s bow to his wife's New Age Medicine, decrying it as "Spirit-crushing foolishness from my candidate, John Kerry." Exclaimed an exasperated Kaus, "The nation is trying to figure out how to fight global terrorism and he's talking about … a Department of Wellness."

Kaus finally exploded, "How about a Department of F***ing Perspective?"

Since candidate John Kerry formally announced the plan to incorporate his wife’s idea to transform the Department of Health and Human Services into a Department of Wellness devoted to New Age Medicine, commentators on both sides of the aisle have reacted with a mixture of derision and consternation.

George Will sniffed at the would-be first couple's most important and most costly policy proposal, "While the nation was reeling from the horrors of Beslan and Baghdad, [Kerry] promised a North Carolina audience that as president he would create a ‘Department of Wellness’ to deal with problems such as house mold."

Slate's Chris Suellentrop traced back Kerry's Department of Wellness policy proposal to a January 2003 Heinz Kerry interview in the Boston Herald in which the candidate’s wife announced her intention to exert "strong advocacy" in a Kerry Administration particularly in the spheres of health, education, women’s issues, and environmental policy. Suellentrop muses,

The other head-scratcher uttered by Kerry in the past two days came Wednesday in Greensboro, N.C. There, in response to a question from a woman about the health problems caused by mold and indoor air contamination—and her complaint, "There's not one agency in this government that has come forward" to deal with the problem—Kerry endorsed the creation of a new federal department. "What I want to do, what I'm determined to do, and it's in my health-care plan, is refocus America on something that can reduce the cost of health care significantly for all Americans, which is wellness and prevention," Kerry said. So far, so good. But then, "And I intend to have not just a Department of Health and Human Services, but a Department of Wellness." Again, what? Apparently this idea comes from Teresa Heinz Kerry....

Health, education, environment and gay rights are areas in which Teresa Heinz Kerry exerts total command and control over Kerry policy, and health care is her highest priority. Particularly since the death of her first senator husband John Heinz III in 1991 and her accession to the leadership of the billion dollar Heinz family charities, health care has been her primary focus. As might be expected, she has profoundly impressed her second senator husband who has so little familiarity with medical care that he refers to his wife as Dr. T and relies on her for advice on his personal health problems as well as his campaign’s programs. Proclaimed Heinz Kerry, "I'm not afraid to say what I believe." As a "woman [who] has opinions," she added caustically, she would not be like "women [who] have been told to shut up for centuries--because they didn't know how to read and write." Ouch.

About Teresa's far-reaching influence on her husband, Kerry biographer and historian Douglas Brinkley said earlier this month in a profile of the presidential candidate on MSNBC, "it is without an exaggeration to say that [Teresa] is his closest advisor. He consults with her constantly."

To Barbara Walters on May 7, 2004, Teresa recounted a conversation she recently had with herself considering whether her husband's presidential run would suit her own needs and ambitions, and provide her a platform to pursue her own social policy agenda, "Walking alone in the woods, thinking, thinking, basically contemplating about life. About where I am in life. And I said, you know, if we get there, then I just have a higher platform from which to share the work that I do already. And John, of course, would have a much larger platform."

According to Newsweek’s Melinda Henneberger, when a reporter asked Heinz Kerry to project what "causes" she might focus on as First Lady, such as health care and the environment, Teresa Heinz Kerry bristled, leaving no doubt that the conventional role was not at all what she has in mind, and snapping back, "My work isn't 'causes.' I have work. I don't mean to insult anyone, but mayors don't have causes, they have work." -- Teresa is being downright self-effacing here: in truth, she does not see her status being limited to that of a mere mayor.

In Mother Jones, Gail Sheehy offers an echo of these remarks with Teresa remonstrating, "They're not causes--they're serious matters in the world. It takes full time. I work six days a week."

Already back in 2003, Heinz Kerry’s words left no doubt in the mind of Boston Herald’s Andrew Miga that she would be the true power behind the health care policy throne if her senator husband is elected president. Reported Miga, "She predicted she would be an activist first lady, lobbying for a Department of Wellness that would stress preventive health."

At a town hall "Conversation on Healthcare" in Las Cruces, NM, Teresa explained that she has been spending nearly 80% of her time on the campaign trail conducting healthcare forums with voters week after week, as we learn from attending admirer Gloria R. LaLumia writing for BuzzFlash.com. LaLumia adds that Teresa always carries with her to each such forum a red three-ring binder, "which, when opened, revealed tabbed sections. The appearance of the red notebook was a signal that we were now going to get involved in some serious business."

LaLumia certifies that Teresa will insure that a president Kerry stays true to his stated priorities, "She is the driving force behind John Kerry’s promises and I believe she and the Kerry team know exactly how to get this program up and running from day one."

How important is health care policy to Teresa Heinz Kerry? How convinced is she of the transforming power of her vision, her New Age religion of biological determinism?

It is important enough, and she is certain enough, to raise the spectre of legislators nationwide being thrown out on their ears if they dare oppose it. Writes Susan Lindt, of the Intelligencer Journal, "Heinz Kerry said her husband's health care plan would be endorsed by legislators-- even naysayers whom she said will find themselves voted out of office if they oppose the plan."

She continues this tactic by raising it to the level of wholesale intimidation, with "Only an idiot wouldn't" like the Kerry health care plan. Ominously, she directly proceeds from such intimidation tactics to her strategy of mass indoctrination of the boorish American masses. Susan Lindt’s recounting of Heinz Kerry’s approach has the First Lady in prospect anticipating the need during a Kerry Administration for mass re-education programs and "retraining Americans to think of health care as wellness and disease-prevention rather than the treatment of illness."

If Teresa has her way, a postmodern Kerry Administration will be predicated on the principle beloved of all tyrannies that reality must be changed to reflect language rather than the reverse. Such linguistic idolatry and manipulation of language is intrinsic to all totalitarian systems and all relativistic schools of thought, from the tyrants of ancient Greece to the socialists to the deconstructionists. The starting point and the common denominator is the denial of human freedom, objective reality and absolute truth. In each case, the worship as well as the perversion of language are inseparable from the denial of objective reality, the annihilation of religion, and the devaluing of human life. Consequently we should expect that under Kerry, re-naming Cabinet departments will not be limited to converting the Department of Health and Human Services into a Department of Wellness. We should anticipate that, Soviet-style, the Justice Department's name will be switched to the Department of Human Restoration and Self-Reinvention; the Education Department will be recast as the Department of Human Potential, Personal Growth and Self-esteem; and in honor of Rep. Dennis Kucinich the Defense Department will be known as the Department of Peace and Reconciliation.

In her Boston Herald interview Heinz Kerry diagnosed the core problem of our poor, benighted America, declaring, "This country is just waiting to have the light switch turned on."

Kerry’s vice-presidential running mate John Edwards mirrored Teresa’s lament with, "Here's the truth. I have grown up in the bright light of America. But that light is flickering today."

John Kerry, Teresa Heinz Kerry and John Edwards want to convince Americans that we live in a state of moral darkness, and all we have to do is grant them control of the switch of state. They tell us that with such power in hand they will enlighten our nation in a way that fits their utopian model of nanny-state liberalism, in which government assumes increasing control over our health and our lives. Yet their utopian model based on biological and psychological determinism directly contradicts the core values of freedom and responsibility that have illumined America's virtuous path to success for more than two hundred years.

BACK TO TERESA ARTICLES HOMEPAGE

Kerry's Genealogy of Immorals

2004-10-28T00:20:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. - Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

Tidings to the contrary Are brought your eyes. - Shakespeare, Pericles, Act 2. Prologue.

Sen. John Kerry’s paternal grandfather, Fred Kerry, was born Fritz Kohn, a European Jew. Kohn changed his name to Kerry and his religion to Catholic before immigrating to the United States, an auspicious choice for a family setting-up shop in America’s most Irish Catholic state, Massachusetts. In the new world Fred Kerry was successful in business and finance, later lost his fortune, started over again, failed once more and prospered all over again. Far-sightedness, perseverance and ambition, we begin to see, are prominent family traits.

Living in the Boston suburb of Brookline under the Kerry name, a name happened-upon by inspecting a map of Ireland before leaving for America, it was presumed by all that grandfather Fred was Irish, and even a newspaper account took his Irishness for granted. Grandfather Fred apparently never left a hint of his Jewish origins, even to his closest friends and associates. Failing to correct false impressions, as we will see, is another of a series of less attractive but no less prominent family traits.

Sen. John Kerry, grandson of Fred, claims to have learned he was one-half Jewish only in 2003 when, as a candidate for the presidency, a great deal of genealogical research was being conducted by Boston Globe reporters in preparation for a major biography. Presidential candidate Kerry's response to the Globe's unsealing his Jewish rather than presumed Irish heritage appeared to be wildly enthusiastic: "incredible stuff," "more than interesting," "a revelation," the senator exclaimed. For a generation accustomed to the postmodern nuances of ClintonSpeak, however, equivocal terms of this ilk are always subject to being deconstructed as less than unequivocally enthusiastic. What we do know is that none of John Kerry's closest family and friends had the least suspicion of his Jewish heritage prior to the Globe disclosure.

Grandfather Fred appears to have lost his fortune one last time after which he committed suicide under somewhat cloudy circumstances not yet thoroughly investigated by the intrepid Globe team; somewhat surprising given his Bostonian grandson's presidential proximity. Using one of the unlicensed handguns to which his gun control advocating grandson Sen. John Kerry is so opposed today, Kerry's formerly prosperous businessman grandfather, having made and then lost his fortune one too many times, shot himself in the head and died in the restroom of Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel. As indicated below, psychiatric disturbance may be one of the prominent Kerry family traits to which Fred Kerry was subject.

On John Kerry's maternal side, there is some interesting data tending to establish a pattern of aberrant character trait transmission across the generations, helping explain at least in part such disparate traits as Sen. Kerry’s proclivity for marrying heiresses of unimaginable wealth, his inclination to leave false impressions, his propensity to betray his country in time of war, his inclination to treasonously flee into the arms of enemy nations after siding with them against America and certain tendencies toward mental instability.

Sen. Kerry, Sen. Edwards, their wives and their campaign team relentlessly castigate President Bush for his being agnostic during the last presidential debate concerning the putative genetic basis of homosexuality. When asked by the debate moderator whether homosexuality is a matter of choice, President Bush committed the unpardonable sin of professing abject ignorance on the question. Under the New Dogmatism of the Kerry-Edwards team, doubt as to the heritability of personality and character traits is impermissible (even though the left almost universally condemns as racist research into the genetics of intelligence). Consequently, we harbor no doubt that Sen. Kerry, Sen. Edwards and their wives, so outraged over George Bush’s wavering on the question, will concur in the notion that traits such as treachery, imposture, pathological lying, unscrupulousness, overweening ambition, not to mention the propensity to marry wealthy women, all occupy specific loci on the bad character gene. Perhaps hypocrisy as well.

One very prominent ancestor of Sen. John Forbes Kerry on the maternal side, his namesake the Rev. John Forbes, the senator’s maternal great-great-great-great grandfather, served as the first magistrate to the governor of Florida in the latter part of the eighteenth century, covering the period of the American revolution. Sen. John Kerry apparently shared more than the first part of his name with the illustrious reverend.

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According to the authorized Boston Globe biography of John Kerry, with whose authors the senator accordingly cooperated, there are the following parallels between Sen. John Forbes Kerry and his forebears:

(1) “Marrying-up”. Just as the socially, financially and politically ambitious Sen. John Kerry married the billionaire heiress Teresa Heinz (his second such marriage to an extremely wealthy woman), so did his ancestor the Rev. John Forbes marry himself an extremely wealthy wife, a Massachusetts heiress, back in the eighteenth century.

(2) Sen. Kerry betrays his country and secretly meets with the enemy in Paris. Kerry and the other members of his family all opposed the Vietnam War before he joined the military. Kerry wrote of his own opposition in an article published in the Harvard Crimson. He entered the military having already formed what fellow Swift Boat commander Larry Thurlow termed a carefully crafted "master plan" for his political career. According to Thurlow, “it became apparent early on that John Kerry had a master plan that went far beyond the service in the Swift Boats, and because of the fact that he was trying to engineer a record.”

(a) In 1968 Kerry would enter active military service in Vietnam, thereby obtaining the political credentials necessary to credibly subvert the American effort to win the war from the inside. As the transcript of the 1971 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing demonstrates, the Kerry plan was highly effective. One of the most influential senators on the Committee, Jacob Javits of New York, remarked, “I wish to associate myself with the statement Senator Symington made when I was here as to your credentials. That is what we always think about with a witness and your credentials couldn't be higher…. It is not as effective unless you have those credentials. The kind you have. I couldn’t think of anybody whose testimony I would rather have and act on from the point of view of what this is doing to our young men we are sending over there.”

(b) While in Vietnam as a Swift Boat commander, Kerry fraudulently obtained, under highly questionable circumstances, three Purple Hearts within just four months for what are now known to have been (unintentionally) self-inflicted and no-bleed band-aid quality injuries. These medals provided him on technical grounds the opportunity to request and obtain an expedited ticket out of Vietnam. As former Republican presidential nominee and severely injured WW II war hero Bob Dole observed, “three Purple Hearts and [Kerry] never bled that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out [of Vietnam].” Kerry turned against his own country, lied about witnessing systemic atrocities, and denounced his fellow soldiers and veterans as drug-addicted baby-killers, sociopaths, war criminals, misfits, torturers and "monsters."

(c) While still in the service of his country as a member of the Naval Reserve, and without authorization from his superiors, Kerry left his own country to secretly meet with enemy leaders overseas in time of war.

(d) Kerry likened the communist leader of North Vietnam to American Revolutionary War leader, and first president, George Washington.

Ancestor Rev. John Forbes flees to England. From the Boston Globe biography we learn that, just as Sen. Kerry betrayed his country during the Vietnam War, so did his maternal great-great-great-great grandfather oppose the American Revolutionary War, granting his loyalty not to his fellow Americans but to the British and, in the words of Kerry's Globe biographers, the esteemed reverend "fled Florida in 1783 and returned to England where he died within months. Such was the inauspicious beginning of the Kerry family in America."

(3) Psychiatric illness and treatment: Grandfather Fred Kerry and John Kerry . As we have seen, paternal grandfather Fred Kerry committed suicide. Since his time in Vietnam, John Kerry appears to have also suffered from psychiatric symptoms of an unspecified nature, severity and chronicity as reported in The Washington Post. According to his second wife, Teresa, John Kerry may have undergone psychiatric treatment with medication or other forms of therapy for symptoms she has personally witnessed since their marriage in 1995, putatively related to Vietnam War “trauma.” Wife Teresa describes John’s violent nightmares, “I haven't gotten slapped yet . . . but there were times when I thought I might get throttled.” Sen. Kerry was instrumental in propagating the false notion that Vietnam vets are disproportionally suicidal and suffer from increased liability to a variety of mental and social pathologies, (and seems to have contributed to establishing the questionable diagnostic category known as PTSD) but when pressed on whether he has undergone psychiatric treatment himself he is strikingly evasive. According to the Washington Post, “Asked if he has been in therapy himself, he non-answers, ‘It doesn't bother me anymore, I just go back to sleep’.” To Dr. Sydney Smith, physician-publisher of MedPundit, this “is the most disturbing aspect of the Teresa Heinz Kerry anecdote. It suggests he has yet to come to terms with the question himself.” To the contrary, this impresses us as a legitimate concern and a serious potential threat to his political viability. The mainstream news media has not pressed him on the matter of his psychiatric history. In spite of this failure, the Kerry campaign felt no inhibition in releasing the psychiatric records of a leader of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth active in opposing his candidacy, as reported in the New York Daily News. It is interesting to note that one of Kerry’s favored weapons against his political opposition, beginning in the days of his protests against the Vietnam War, has been to smear his opponents in general, and Vietnam veterans in particular, as suicidally crazed or criminally inclined, vagrants and derelicts, drug addicts and maniacs. He used this slander technique in 1971 as part of the process of vilifying all Vietnam veterans in order to gain himself a national political platform, and he applies the same technique today to distract from his refusing to answer the charges of the rest of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that he is an impostor who fraudulently obtained his medals and his early release from combat duty inVietnam, and then proceeded to defame his fellow soldiers and POWs. Speaking to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, on September 10, 2004 and holding in his hand a copy of his best-selling book "Unfit for Command," Swift Boat Veterans for Truth leader John O'Neill explained, “I'm going to suggest to you that the reason [Kerry] hasn't answered a single thing about this book, is that there is no answer to what's in this book--this book is absolutely the truth…. That's why he hasn't answered the book.--How has he reacted? He has reacted with a series of vicious attacks on the messenger. [The Kerry campaign] leaked information to the New York Daily News about a fifteen year ago suicide, attempted suicide, by one of the signers of our letter.”

Whether Sen. John Kerry inherited any of his paternal grandfather's self-destructive tendencies is unknown--apart from the senator’s consistent and relentless suicidal compulsion to dismantle every facet of America’s military, intelligence and nuclear capability in the face of the gravest imaginable threats from tyrannies and terrorist organizations spanning the decades from the Cold War through the current War on Terrorism. We do know, however, that he has suffered from highly disturbing symptoms, though documentation on the precise nature of these symptoms and any treatment for them has been scrupulously hidden from an indifferent press corps.

There are any number of other negative character traits that might be traceable either to the mental instability of Sen. Kerry's grandfather Fred, or the disloyalty of his namesake the Rev. John Forbes. These reportedly include qualities as seemingly innocent as a remote and aloof manner and a group of more serious character flaws including a tendency to various forms of fraud and imposture, pathological lying. The following is a list of a few such character traits:

(1) At the time of his Vietnam War protests, Kerry affected a transparently fake and affected high Boston accent, shibboleth of any aspiring JFK-monogrammed wannabe from Boston. The accent is accompanied by pronunciation anomalies precipitously adopted by the ambitious presidential aspirant from Massachusetts while at Yale and subsequently preserved throughout his anti-Vietnam War days. These anomalies are exemplified by his substitution of the soft Yale-inspired Jen-jis Khan for the familiar Genghis Khan. According to Kerry's childhood schoolmate Brit Hume of Fox News this accent did not exist at all before the would-be president's Yale days and his anti-Vietnam War testimony. Of course, there remains not the slightest trace of it today. Hume suggests, “Kerry speaks with an accent which he didn't have when I knew him when we were little boys together--and he doesn't have now, but he had then--it's quite striking. And I'm not sure it helps him.” This Vietnam era pronunciation affectation has been described by his Boston Globe biographers as a "deep Boston accent, even though Kerry had spent most of his life outside the state," as a result of which, the biographers continue, Kerry sometimes "sounded eerily like [John F.] Kennedy" (p. 31), with whom he shared the initials JFK. Robert F. Worth of The New York Times dryly comments that, these days, Kerry has shed “the upper-class drawl of his youth,” but Worth blurs the dramatic transformation, adding “but his soft vowels and formal diction still hint at a privileged lineage.”

Only The New York Times would feel the need for a cover-up to conceal Kerry’s voice change operation in much the same way an embarrassed mother might conceal her son’s sex change operation.

Peggy Noonan acutely observes, “Mr. Kerry has a problem with rhetoric. He doesn't have his own sound. You may hate Mr. Bush's sound but it's his, and a lot of people like it. He sounds normal, which for all its pluses and minuses as a style does tend to underscore the idea that he is normal…. JFK himself came forward as JFK. He didn't present himself to the world with a cigarette-holder, a jut-jawed chin and rimless eyeglasses. That is to say, he did not make believe he was FDR, the party's giant who'd died just 15 years before. JFK knew to be JFK. Kerry should be Kerry. This is assuming there is a Kerry. For argument's sake, let's.”

"Without reprieve, adjudged to death, For want of well-pronouncing
shibboleth." - Judg. 12:1-6.

Kerry channeled his old idol, John F. Kennedy, too, his well-modulated radio announcer's voice abruptly morphing into JFK's high-Boston accent, turning "ideas" into "idears." - Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2004.

(2) Kerry's unconvincing present-day attempts at everyday folksiness and hipness: (a) dropped g's such as nothin' for nothing; (b) a surplus of antiquated hipster expressions such as "Hey, man," and 60's gestures such as recently taking a drag on an "air joint." as well as (c) the presidential candidate’s incessant use of sportsy "gut-checking" variants, especially his insufferably repetitious real-man references to feeling what's in his "gut;" (d) simulations of Kennedy family sports, except that in Kerry's case this takes the form not of playing on the lawn, but of ostentatious athletic posing on every airport tarmac campaign stop. Typically, Kerry and an aide can be seen incongruously playing catch in the plane's shadow while dressed in business attire. Noonan’s revealing observations are again apposite, "Mr. Kerry is one of those rare public men who never get over self-consciousness in public. He's also that rare athlete who seems to lack physical grace. . . . He seems affected because he's self-conscious, and this is compounded by an air of premeditation.... He seems to be enacting sports more than enjoying them. He always seems to be enacting rather than enjoying."

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(3) Kerry has been attempting to convince the electorate that he is pro-gun (witness the recent goose hunt in Ohio), tough on defense (“I will never let those troops down and will hunt and kill the terrorists wherever they are,” and in favor of middle-class tax cuts (at the second presidential debate St. Louis, Missouri, October 8, 2004, when asked by an audience member at the townhall-style debate if he would agree to “look directly into the camera and using simple and unequivocal language, give the American people your solemn pledge not to sign any legislation that will increase the tax burden on families earning less than $200,000 a year during your first term,” the Senator gamely adopted a choir boy countenance and swore to the folks at home, “Absolutely, yes. Right into the camera, yes. I am not going to raise taxes…. I mean, you got to stand up and fight somewhere, folks. I'm pledging I will not raise taxes.” This, from the senator from Massachusetts who is rated by the non-partisan National Journal as the most extremely liberal in the entire U. S. Senate, and by any measure has devoted his decades-long tax-hiking, gun-controlling, government-expanding, nuclear-freezing political career to advancing the liberal side of the liberal side on every issue of consequence to the polity.

(4) Sen. Kerry has done more than any living human being to besmirch the reputations of Vietnam veterans as deviants, drug addicts, misfits, vagrants and homicidal or suicidal maniacs when the truth is rather that, in the medical and scientific literature, the rates of homelessness, joblessness, psychiatric disorder, crime, suicide and homicide among Vietnam veterans have been conclusively demonstrated--in exhaustive studies conducted, for instance, by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control to be statistically equal to or lower than the rates for the rest of the American population; or, as retired U.S. Navy Seal captain and Vietnam veteran John Bailey put it, “more than any other person, John Kerry is responsible for the false image of Vietnam veterans as dysfunctional misfits. Kerry betrayed all of us when he returned from Vietnam.”

(5) The ever-gallant Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have demonstrated that on several key issues John F. Kerry has fraudulently obtained medals for purported injuries and acts of bravery to which he was not entitled, and has used those medals to obtain an early out from active duty in Vietnam after hardly four months—according to John O’Neill, the only Swift Boat crew member or officer to have served a small fraction of the required tour of duty during the entire Vietnam conflict, apart from those who suffered disabling injuries. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth make an extremely strong case that John Kerry was an impostor and faked the injuries that were the basis of the medals he received. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth also question why Kerry refuses to sign Form 180, to release all of his service records to explain the many discrepancies and also to explain why his discharge was delayed as a result of which he received it many years after it would normally have been granted.

(6) John Kerry repeatedly claimed that he had illegally penetrated Cambodian waters on Christmas eve of 1968, as part of then-President Nixon's secret extension of the Vietnam War, explaining that this memory was “seared in” his brain. This claim has been proven utterly false, as recently acknowledged even by Kerry’s most vehement defenders--not to mention the fact that Nixon was not even president at the time. It is Kerry’s oft-repeated explanation that the memory of an event that never occurred is burned into his memory that makes one wonder whether the senator is delusional or just a fraud.

(7) in 1971, Kerry provided overwhelmingly false and misleading, and in many instances fraudulent, testimony to the U. S. Senate as to widespread, systematic and officially sanctioned atrocities committed in Vietnam by virtually all Americans serving there in combat throughout the war. Kerry and his fellow protest organizers in the VVAW contrived this slanderous testimony during the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings that he supervised, even though a large proportion of those who provided accounts of supposed atrocities were not combat Vietnam veterans, in some cases not veterans at all, refused to prepare legal affidavits or in a variety of other ways demonstrably dissembled. When finally pressed on the matter, however, Kerry acknowledged on television that he had himself repeatedly committed genuine war crimes in Vietnam. As with his Cambodia recollections, such testimony raises questions about whether Swift Boat commander John Kerry simply lied about alleged war crimes or fell victim to delusional forms of thinking and remembering.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. - Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971.
(8) In an interview with Charlie Gibson, host of ABC’s Good Morning America program, Kerry was confronted with lies and imposture regarding his throwing away his medals during 1971 anti-war protests in Washington organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Interviewed at the time of the protests, he confirmed that he had thrown his own medals. Years later, Kerry claimed that he pitched only his ribbons and that “medals” stands for ribbons and medals equally. Later, when confronted with eyewitness testimony that he had flung medals and not only ribbons, he first denied it vociferously and finally admitted that he did throw medals but that they belonged to one or more other soldiers and only the ribbons were his. In so doing he at least implicitly acknowledged that when it fit his own political interests he intentionally and misleadingly led onlookers and the media representatives who interviewed him to falsely conclude that he tossed his own medals, and then later, equally misleadingly, denied he jettisoned any medals when denial seemed to better suit those same political interests. Only Kerry himself knew the secret distinction between his own medals, and those of others, a distinction that enabled him to both affirm and deny throwing away medals. Once again, he displayed his ancestral trait of intentionally leaving false impressions. Ever since the 1971 incident, Kerry displayed that precocious and pre-Clintonian gift for postmodern ambiguities, nuances and equivocal interpretations of words such as medals and ribbons for which he has recently gained so much renown in the matter of the $87 billion Supplemental appropriation for the Iraq War. In a statement reminiscent of Bill Clinton's claim that he smoked but did not actually inhale marijuana, Kerry also explained to Gibson that originally he was only in favor of placing the medals gently on a table before he relented later and reluctantly agreed to heave them over the fence.

Here it is quite difficult to separate simple dissimulation and quibbling from psychiatrically significant delusional thinking and remembering. Did Kerry “remember” throwing medals even though he later changed his story to ribbons? When forced to admit he actually threw medals, did he really remember other soldiers who asked him to toss their medals? When he first asserted that he threw away the medals and later claimed the term “medals” covers ‘ribbons,’ did he genuinely believe this to be the case? When he later claimed that he wanted to gently deposit medals on a table but was rebuffed by his fellow organizers, did this debate really occur and can it be corroborated by others? When he told the story of other soldiers who asked him to fling their medals during the protest, we may not only ask why they would not want to toss their medals themselves, but whether these soldiers actually exist--can they be produced for purposes of corroboration?

(9) Obtaining an annulment of his first marriage to the mother of his children that involved a claim before God that his marriage of nearly two decades never occurred and his children are not the legitimate offspring of that marriage.--Is this not another form of fraud for expediency’s sake?

Finally, Sen. Kerry inadvertently disclosed his own dying mother's revelatory concerns for his lapsed integrity during his third and final debate of the 2004 presidential campaign with President Bush:

And she looked at me from her hospital bed and she just looked at me and she said, "Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity. "Those are the three words that she left me with." - John F. Kerry, Third Presidential Debate, 2004
This encounter with his mother occurred just a couple of years ago. Why would a dying mother administer an intense, penetrating stare, and why would she triple-repeat-for-emphasis the word "integrity" to a son who was embarking on a presidential campaign.--And why the admonitory, "Remember" so meaningfully imparted?

What explanation could there possibly be other than a concerned mother's intent to convey most searingly the fact that she harbored the gravest doubts as to her son’s "integrity;" mustn't she have fretted that this was John Kerry's Achilles heel, the one thing her son's character defects would compel him to abjure, whether in his antecedent 1971 testimony or in an anticipated presidential contest in which his integrity would be put to the test?

In the end John Kerry leaves us only with questions.

Is the image we see of John Kerry a reflection of what his mother wanted, a man of integrity? Is he the reflection of paternal grandfather Fred Kerry, the suicidally unstable man of unbridled but failed ambition? Or is he the descendant of the Benedict Arnold-like anti-American Rev. John Forbes, the great-great-great-great grandfather who so ambitiously married up but sold-out his country and whose ignominious end marks the true starting point of John Kerry’s quest for the presidency?

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Private Pleading: CNN's Wolf Blitzer Neuters Nader

2004-10-26T22:03:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

RatherGate appears to have been a joint venture of a fevered Bush hater, the Kerry campaign and CBS’s 60 Minutes featuring Dan Rather.

The end was to assist challenger Sen. John Kerry in unseating the incumbent President Bush by proving Bush to be unfit for office.

The means to that end involved utilizing forged Kinko-generated documents purporting to show that George Bush shirked his military obligations and failed to obey direct orders during his Vietnam War-era stateside military service.

RatherGate is just the tip of a bias iceberg globally positioned at the extreme tip of the southernmost pole of the mainstream media. What every TV viewer of Judge Judy’s show grasps effortlessly escaped the comprehension of the most high media lords and ladies, namely, that once a witness is caught telling one lie, he is thereby permanently impeached as a liar and nothing else in his testimony should be considered credible.

RatherGate demonstrated why Dan Rather has for so long retained the heavyweight belt for journalistic low blows.

If Rather holds the heavyweight title, then the middleweight crown surely belongs to Wolf Blitzer of CNN. Week after week, the celebrated CNN anchor pleads the case for electing Sen. John Kerry president of the United States while posing as objective.

Even when his Sunday "news" show, CNN’s "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer," occasionally makes the pretense of impartiality by inviting guests representing both political parties, Blitzer is seen lobbing political softballs at the Democrat while launching precision-guided nuclear-tipped missiles at the Republican. When the Democratic Party representative falters or even hesitates, Blitzer jumps-in suggesting rationalizations and excuses for Kerry’s flubs and contradictions, and cueing favored liberal guests when they momentarily stray from their otherwise well-honed Democratic talking points. By contrast, CNN’s journalistic weisse Engel applies an electron microscope to the task of dissecting every last word of his Republican guests.

Blitzer’s most outrageous strategem during the current election season was on display on the Sunday, October 17, 2004 edition of CNN’s "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer," in which Blitzer renounced any pretense of politically neutral news interviewing, and instead unremittingly encouraged third party candidate Ralph Nader to withdraw from the presidential contest because he is hurting the chances of the media’s chosen candidate Sen. John Kerry.

The excerpted portions of the interview below show Blitzer first encouraging Terry McAuliffe, Chairman of the Democratic Party, to make an appeal to Ralph Nader to withdraw from the race, and then minutes later aggressively confronting and pressuring Nader himself; alternately needling, demanding and imploring the consumer advocate to abandon his vain quest for the presidency.

The transcript shows Blitzer first prompting TERRY MCAULIFFE, CHAIRMAN OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY:

BLITZER [prompting Terry McAuliffe Chairman of the Democratic Party, to make an appeal to RALPH NADER, THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT]: Terry McAuliffe, we're about to speak to Ralph Nader, the independent party presidential candidate. Are you going to appeal to him one more time, "Drop out?"

MCAULIFFE: Yes, I would appeal to Ralph Nader, you have fought your whole life for corporate governance and you have fought your whole life on the issues, the environment and so many things that you have cared about....Ralph, I'm appealing to you: please help us. We have got to beat George Bush….

After a commercial break, WOLF BLITZER INTERVIEWS RALPH NADER:

BLITZER: Independent in party label as well as in spirit, presidential candidate Ralph Nader is in the race, although way behind. But he's tough-skinned enough, some would say stubborn enough, to stay in this race where a percentage point or two could very well determine the outcome in several key battleground states.

RALPH NADER (I), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you, Wolf.

BLITZER: All right. [Kerry's] basically telling the truth, that you're not going to be the president of the United States. Why stay in this race?... you just heard Terry McAuliffe say on this program that on so many of the issues that are so close to your heart, John Kerry and the Democrats are so much closer to you than George W. Bush.... Now, [on the matter of collaborating with the Democrats,] have you switched?

NADER: No, they repudiated offers to collaborate, even offers to collaborate in the spillover vote for my candidacy to help the Democrats win the House and Senate.

BLITZER: But do you still want to collaborate with him to dislodge George W. Bush?

NADER: Absolutely. I'll make this -- on your program -- I'll make this offer, after listening to Terry McAuliffe.

If any of the Democratic fat cats want to finance a one-minute national television ad, I will go on and take Bush and Cheney apart on their record without even mentioning my candidacy or asking anybody to vote for me....

BLITZER: But basically you're acknowledging, from your perspective, the country would be better off with Kerry in the White House as opposed to Bush?

NADER: Least worse off, that's right.

BLITZER: Well, can you say it, it would be better off?...You saw what Winona LaDuke said this past week. She was your running-mate on the Green Party in 2000. She said, "I'm voting my conscience on November 2nd. I'm voting for John Kerry."... [displaying a chart showing Nader drawing votes away from Kerry] I want to put these numbers up on the screen. We've looked at some of the more recent battleground state polls. Florida, you've got 3 percent. Iowa, 4 percent. Maine, 3 percent. Minnesota, 2.7 percent. New Hampshire, 1 percent. New Mexico, 1.7 percent. Look at this. In Wisconsin, you're getting 4 percent in a recent battleground poll up there as well. What -- how...

NADER: You make it sound like it's terrible. It's healthy to have more voices and choices.

BLITZER: But if you're a Democrat, and you're going to win this presidency -- it is terrible if you're a Democrat. You understand why the Democrats are so nervous about the potential 1 or 2 or 3 percent you could get and the fact that that could tilt the scales in favor of Bush? ... But given how close it could be in Pennsylvania, and how critical that is to John Kerry, who you acknowledge yourself is the least bad of the options right now, why not just forget about Pennsylvania and not get on the ballot?

NADER: Because we're pushing for a major political reform movement long after November 2. We will never turn our back on the millions of Americans who are coming into our Web site, voteNader.org, for real, important reasons about why the country needs an independent political movement and more voices and choices.

BLITZER: All right. Final question, is there any chance at all between now and November 2nd you'll drop out?

NADER: Of course not....

BLITZER: All right. Ralph Nader, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

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The Real "Iraq-al Qaeda Connection"

2004-10-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros , Steven Eros

Foreign and domestic opponents of the war in Iraq claimed (and continue to claim) that it merely distracted America from what should have been an exclusive concentration on the War on Terrorism, arguing that there was no compelling proof of Saddam Hussein’s complicity in the September 11 attacks or involvement with Osama bin Laden.

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In response to the latter claim, Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, asserted a direct causal link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks, in the March 12, 2003, issue of the Washington Post. Mead correctly observed that Saddam Hussein’s noncompliance compelled U.S. forces to stay in Saudi Arabia ever since the 1991 Gulf War in order to maintain the sanctions regime and related restrictions imposed by the United Nations (UN). Saddam Hussein’s persistent cheating and mistreatment of his own people, coupled with his unrelenting threat to his highly vulnerable oil-rich neighbors, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, made it impossible for America to extricate itself from its military bases in Saudi Arabia.

Mead noted further that it was principally in order to expel the U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia that Osama bin Laden created the al Qaeda terrorist network. Saudi Arabia is the home of the two most important Islamic holy sites in the world and is the birthplace of the Prophet Mohammed. As such, bin Laden considered it unacceptable for military forces of an “infidel” nation to be stationed there.
Hence, Mead argues, “The existence of al Qaeda, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, are part of the price the United States has paid to contain Saddam Hussein.” He concludes, “This is the link between Saddam Hussein’s defiance of international law and the events of September 11; it is clear and compelling. No Iraqi violations, no September 11.”

By this logic, however, one could also lay blame for September 11 directly on the United States, for if the American presence had anything to do with bringing on the attack, the United States certainly had ultimate control over the decision to deploy its forces in Saudi Arabia. (“No American interventionism, no September 11.”) One could equally blame Kuwait’s political and military weakness for its needing American intervention against Iraq in the first place. (“No Kuwaiti weakness, no September 11.”) The UN itself might be indicted for instituting unworkable sanctions, the violation of which by Saddam Hussein led to the U.S. intervention. (“No UN sanctions, no September 11.”) Or one could hold Britain accountable, for failing to draw effective borders in fashioning the Iraqi state decades ago. (“No Iraq, no September 11.”) This won’t do. Basic logic teaches that such “counterfactual conditionals” are insufficient to establish either causality or criminal responsibility.

In spite of this, it is possible to establish positively that Saddam Hussein is legally and morally responsible for the September 11 attacks. The key is to combine two tools of criminology: forensic timeline analysis, and basic principles of legal criminal responsibility.

One longstanding legal principle applies the felony murder statute to criminal behavior that causes “accidental” death or harm. If I commit a serious crime and in doing so accidentally cause an innocent person to die, then I may be held guilty of murder—even if his death was not my direct intention. For instance, if I set an arson fire in a building I believe vacant, and an unseen occupant dies, then I am responsible for his murder even if his death was “unintentional.”

This is where forensic timeline analysis proves Saddam Hussein’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks. In the case at hand, we know that, in violation of international law, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened to attack Saudi Arabia. Having been expelled by coalition forces during the Gulf War, as Mead notes, Saddam knew that his continuous flouting of the Gulf War cease-fire agreements, UN-imposed sanctions, and the continuing threat of conquest he posed to his Kuwaiti and Saudi neighbors were compelling American forces to remain in Saudi Arabia.

To establish Saddam’s complicity in the September 11 attacks requires demonstrating the additional proposition that Saddam could not plausibly claim ignorance concerning Osama bin Laden’s terrorist response to our Saudi presence—in the form of al Qaeda attacks over the course of the succeeding years. This is easily done. Every national leader in the region, including Saddam, was well aware of bin Laden’s rage over America’s status in Saudi Arabia. It cannot have escaped Saddam’s attention that in the decade after the Gulf War the United States was subjected to a series of terrorist attacks for this very reason. Accordingly, if we add to the timeline the series of al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States, what this in effect amounts to is a continuous state of war or threat of war, in which Saddam Hussein and bin Laden are equally complicit, with Saddam’s recurrent sanctions violations and threats to world oil supplies all the while obligating America to keep troops in Saudi Arabia, thereby provoking bin Laden to attack the United States repeatedly for the perceived outrage against his religion.

Given that his behavior both during the Gulf War and after was a criminal violation of international law, the legal principle regarding felony murder applies. This felony murder analysis, of course, requires that Saddam Hussein be held responsible for all the reasonably anticipated results of his criminal behavior, not just those he directly intended. Those consequences included every one of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the United States and its interests throughout the world, ranging from the first bombing of the World Trade Center to the suicide hijacking attacks of September 11, and from the bombing of the Khobar Towers military complex and the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania to the USS Cole attack in the port of Aden, Yemen.

Saddam Hussein had the ability and the opportunity to prevent all of these atrocities, but instead he continuously, knowingly, and criminally placed the United States in a position of vulnerability to al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. For this reason, he is legally and morally responsible for all of them, including September 11. This, in turn, demonstrates that the recent Iraq war was an inseparable part of the War on Terrorism.

This article appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of American Outlook.

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The Network War Against Rush Limbaugh

2004-01-09T01:01:00.000-05:00

by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros

This article was originally published in Human Events magazine and humaneventsonline

Rush Limbaugh's dependence on painkillers, his recent drug treatment, and related legal problems have headlined the three major network news broadcasts repeatedly over a period of many weeks now. The reports are consistently cast in the most lurid, exaggerated, inflammatory and prejudicial terms.

The persistent drumbeat began with Limbaugh's ESPN comments alleging media favoritism toward black quarterback Donovan McNabb and exploded in the days following the National Enquirer's disclosure of Limbaugh's addiction to painkillers.

Network anchors Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings all slyly insinuated that Limbaugh was himself participating in drug selling operations, with references to his involvement in a "powerful drug ring" (Rather-CBS) "drug-selling" (Brokaw-NBC), and "sale of black market prescription drugs" (Jennings-ABC).

The network news conjured up "recreational drug use," shooting-up "hillbilly heroin," "huge amounts of cash to buy drugs," "money laundering," and participation in "narcotics rings." For CBS anchor Dan Rather, simple doctor shopping was not enough, so he reported allegations of "serious doctor shopping" (perhaps attaining the level "serious" was what justified the prosecutors' "raiding" of Limbaugh's private doctors' offices for evidence).

Likewise, addiction to mere prescription painkillers was insufficiently sensational, so Rather's report spoke of drugs "often sold by powerful drug traffickers" (one wonders if this breathless reference to traffickers was to Limbaugh's alleged main source, the "powerful drug trafficker" who served as his housemaid for several years). Obscured or omitted was the fact that Limbaugh's use of painkillers was occasioned by pain resulting from what Limbaugh characterized as "unsuccessful spinal surgery" and from surgical insertion of a cochlear implant to cure his deafness.

Several Democratic Party leaders, presidential candidates, and left-wing activists seemed openly gleeful. Presidential contender Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) could not resist his trademark "cheap shot" when, in the middle of the Oct. 9, 2003, Democratic Party presidential debate, the senator quipped, "There are two ways for you to have lower prescription drug costs. One is, you could hire Rush Limbaugh's housekeeper."

In the same spirit, NBC "Today Show" host Katie Couric tittered, "I feel actually good. Rush Limbaugh sat next to me. . . . And he gave me some vitamins. Whoo!"

So interchangeable have become position statements made at Democratic Party presidential debates and jokes made on NBC's "Tonight Show." Al Franken's ubiquity as conservative media critic and Democratic Party mouthpiece would seem to fit the same pattern of commutability and commensurability of opposites. Perhaps to former Gov. Dean's "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" must be added the "Media Wing of the Democratic Party."

Other Democratic Party presidential hopefuls were more direct in expressing their hatred of, and preoccupation with, Rush Limbaugh. Dick Gephardt, in a Dec. 22, 2003, Wall Street Journal article, explains widespread Democratic hatred of President Bush by reference to what he terms "Limbaugh invective" suffusing the media. Howard Dean and Al Sharpton demanded Limbaugh resign for his McNabb remarks. Bizarrely, presidential contender Wesley Clark wrote letters demanding that ABC and ESPN fire him for "hateful and ignorant speech." Insisted the retired general who succeeded in ridding the world of the likes of Milosevic but patiently believes Saddam Hussein should have been retained as Iraqi dictator, "Mr. Limbaugh should be fired immediately."

The Rush Limbaugh timeline below exposes the elite media's political effort to demonize and discredit Rush Limbaugh, giving a false impression of criminal activity in the absence of any evidence. Taken together with the other media and political attacks on the conservative broadcasting superstar, these comments signify nothing less than an all-out "War Against Rush Limbaugh" jointly being waged by the elite media and Democratic Party politicians.

About the criminal probes, Limbaugh attorney Roy Black asks rhetorically, "Of all of the . . . millions of people who've become addicted to painkillers, some very well-known people, have you ever seen search warrants served on their doctor's offices? Have you ever watched people on television leafing through records, calling out the names of their doctors and a list of medications they were using? Has anyone ever seen that before? The first person is Rush Limbaugh. And you have to ask yourself, why is that?"

The talk radio legend suggested that he knew the answer, cryptically commenting, "I know where the story comes from. I know who's behind it. And I know what the purpose of the. . . story is. And I'll be able to tell you at some point."

Why the involvement of the Democratic Party presidential candidates? Why the inflammatory rhetoric of the network news anchors? Why the politically motivated raids on Limbaugh's doctors' offices? Simply viewing the Rush Limbaugh timeline makes the answers quite obvious here, now, today, without having to wait for Limbaugh's own explanation.

Does anyone remember seeing any such sleazy network news coverage of the dredged-up allegations of decades-old recreational use of cocaine by NBC's own Matt Lauer that surfaced a few weeks ago? A search of the news databases found not a one. Yet the Lauer story featured in the National Enquirer the same month as the Limbaugh allegations. Did Dan, Tom, Peter, and Katie simply overlook it?
Media TimelineSept. 28, 2003:Limbaugh criticizes McNabb on ESPN: "The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well"

Oct. 1, 2003: Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark writes letter urging ESPN and ABC to fire "hateful and ignorant" Limbaugh for McNabb remarks; more than 20 House Democrats urge ESPN to fire Limbaugh

Oct. 2, 2003: AP report: "Democratic presidential candidates Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, the Rev. Al Sharpton had called for ESPN to fire Limbaugh."

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2003: Peter Jennings, "World News Tonight," ABC: "the NAACP and at least one Presidential candidate said today ESPN should can him."

Thursday Oct. 2, 2003: Limbaugh Reported Out As ESPN Sports Analyst.

Thursday Oct. 2, 2003: National Enquirer Story, "Rush Limbaugh Caught In Drug Ring!"

Thursday Oct. 2, 2003: Dan Rather, CBS "Evening News": HEADLINE: Rush Limbaugh resigns ESPN job over racist remarks and is now under investigation for connection to drug ring.

Dan Rather: "Rush Limbaugh . . . he's being investigated for possible connections to a powerful drug ring in south Florida."

Thursday Oct. 2, 2003: Peter Jennings, "World News Tonight," ABC: "As for Rush Limbaugh . . . [he is] now being investigated for possible involvement in the sale of black market prescription drugs."

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2003: Tom Brokaw, NBC "Nightly News": ". . . tabloid headlines that he's involved in an illegal prescription drug-selling probe in his home state of Florida."

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2003: Dan Rather, CBS "Evening News": Dan Rather: "stories abound about Rush Limbaugh and a drug gang . . . ."

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2003: Dan Rather, CBS "Evening News": ". . . talk radio's Rush Limbaugh and renewed focus on narcotics rings that traffic in the potent painkiller OxyContin."

Friday, Oct. 10, 2003: Dan Rather, CBS "Evening News": "Rush Limbaugh, who refused to talk for days about allegations. . . is hooked on drugs . . . often sold by powerful drug traffickers. "

Friday, Oct. 10, 2003: Rush Limbaugh Admits Dependence and Resolves To Enter Drug Rehabilitation.

Monday, Oct. 13, 2003: Hannah Storm, co-host "The Early Show," CBS: "Rush Limbaugh . . . he is a drug addict . . . he lost his job at ESPN . . . forced to make this admission . . . OxyContin. . . that's hillbilly heroin, 'cause people shoot that up to get high. . . . How can you make the distinction that he wasn't using that for recreational purposes . . . should he go to jail?

Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003: Rush Limbaugh Exits Drug Rehabilitation.

Monday, Nov. 17, 2003: Rush Limbaugh Resumes Broadcasting After Month Long Stay At Drug Rehabilitation Clinic.

Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2003: Peter Jennings, "World News Tonight," ABC: HEADLINE: A Closer Look: Rush Limbaugh Under Investigation. Peter Jennings: "The talk show host just finished five weeks of treatment. His legal difficulties may continue. Officials are now looking into whether Limbaugh laundered money . . .". Brian Ross, investigative reporter: "Limbaugh's lawyers say he did not do that and that he is being falsely accused by those who want to force him off the air. Officials say a decision on whether to prosecute Limbaugh on money laundering charges or anything else, Peter, will be made in the next few weeks."

Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2003: Elizabeth Vargas, "World News Tonight," ABC: "Talk show host Rush Limbaugh . . . may face money laundering charges. . . huge amounts of cash to buy drugs. Limbaugh doesn't deny. . . ." Rush Limbaugh: "There wasn't any money laundering going on. And I know where the story comes from. I know who's behind it. And I know what the purpose of the, of the story is. And I'll be able to tell you at some point."

Thursday, Dec. 4, 2003: Tom Brokaw, NBC "Nightly News": Tom Brokaw: "There's more trouble for radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh . . . investigators raided his doctor's offices [for] what they call 'doctor shopping' for prescription painkillers."

Friday, Dec. 5, 2003: Dan Rather, CBS "Evening News": Dan Rather: "CBS investigates serious doctor-shopping drug allegations against Rush Limbaugh."

Friday, Dec. 5, 2003: Katie Couric, NBC "Today show": "Rush Limbaugh with a big legal headache today. Investigators stormed the offices of four of his doctors."

Friday, Dec. 5, 2003: Roy Black, Rush Limbaugh's attorney, appears on NBC "Today show": "Sure. Does anybody really believe Rush Limbaugh went to an ear surgeon and had an implant put in his head so he could have an excuse to get prescriptions? I mean, when you think about this it's really absurd. And look where this started. It started out, 'he's part of a drug ring, or drug trafficking.' Then, supposedly, 'he does money laundering.' Now they've gone all the way to say 'doctor shopping.' Every week it is something new. . . an elected public official in Florida simply could not ignore the name Rush Limbaugh. And guess what? He's being treated differently than anybody else I've ever seen in the history of this country . . . . Let me ask you this: Of all of the . . . millions of people who've become addicted to painkillers, some very well known people, have you ever seen search warrants served on their doctor's offices? Have you ever watched people on television leafing through records, calling out the names of their doctors and a list of medications they were using? Has anyone ever seen that before? The first person is Rush Limbaugh. And you have to ask yourself, why is that?"

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