Senator-Doctor Bill Frist and House Leader Tom DeLay have played a cruel hoax on the Schindler family by misleading them about the nature of the Congressional Bill which sent the Schiavo case into the Federal Court System.
David Shuster writing in HardBlogger explains:
Based on what Schiavo's parents have been saying this week, it appears the legislation's fine print was never shared with them by Bill Frist or anybody else for that matter.
Early Monday morning, after President Bush signed the Schiavo bill, Bob Schindler was positively beaming in front of the television cameras. He said he walked into his daughter's hospice room and told her, "We had to wake the President up to save your life."
Did Bill Frist and Tom Delay ever call the Schindler family and say, "not so fast?" Apparently not. In their latest court filing, the Schinder family still clings to the misleading notion offered by lawmakers last weekend that their bill required Schiavo's feeding tube to be immediately reinserted. Quote, "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power to let her die..." says the Schindler's filing, then passing the law "would be little more than a cruel hoax." Read it again... The Schindlers argue: "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power..." The fact is, that's exactly what Congress did. And a "cruel hoax" on Terry Schiavo's family is exactly the right description. As one of my doctor contacts observed, "This has always been about politics, not about helping Terri Schiavo or her parents."
Bill Frist and Tom Delay, politicians to the core, have been unrestrained by normal moral taboos in their manipulation of the Schindlers. To heighten the embarassment of their scandalous behavior the Schindlers carried their rosy misunderstanding of the toothlessness of the Frist-Delay Bill into a filing in a Court of Law.
Frist and DeLay have committed crass, cynical, opportunistic abuse of the distraught mother and father of a dying woman. Both men should feel shame for their actions.