Twice this year, it was payback time to evangelical extremists for the Bush Boys. And twice the president and his wannabe-president baby brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, blundered while debasing their offices.
The Bush Boys had sold out to the rabble exploiting brain-dead Terri Schiavo for their "culture of life" politics.
As if responding to a terrorist attack on Washington, President Bush leaped aboard Air Force One ($45,000 per hour to operate, plus accompanying aircraft carrying his limo and security vans) to rush overnight to Washington to sign a hastily cobbled together bill aimed at keeping Schiavo plugged into tubes. Bush could have signed the bill at his Texas ranch. But a frantic return to Washington was just the dramatic TV footage White House image managers wanted.
The president and the bill's obedient congressional signatories obviously hadn't learned: brother Jeb's attempt to intervene with state legislation was thrown out by the courts, just as President Bush's heavily condemned legislation would be.
Baby brother Jeb and antagonists in the Schiavo drama are sore losers: The governor spitefully asked a state attorney to investigate possible criminal conduct of husband Michael Schiavo when Terri fell into a coma -- 15 years earlier!
His vindictiveness boomeranged: no misconduct was found. The state attorney closed the case June 30 with a letter to Jeb, who concealed it until July 7, in hopes London bombings and Hurricane Dennis would distract attention from his blundering miscalculation.
These episodes are instructive. They reveal the Bush Boys' willingness to use their offices for fringe groups who're no more representative of mainstream Christians than Muslim terrorists typify Islam.
Read what former Republican U.S. senator, Episcopal minister and former Bush ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth says: "When we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube."
The country will recover from Bush boorishness.
The country, however, has a far graver problem with President Bush's plans to fill the U.S. Supreme Court with justices devoted to the daft "religious" agenda that turned the Schiavo tragedy into a sideshow of street people chanting hare-brained "religious" slogans.
Sadly, not much stands in his way. Outwitted Democrats in Washington are little more than amusing annoyances. Washington media that once influenced events with their stature have been reduced to acting like Nervous Nellies around the brash Bush clan.
Pat Murphy
