Is the Schiavo case simply another Bush attack on science?

There are other methods to this madness, of course, the most obvious being the Republican appeasement of the religious right and the right-to-lifers.

But, considering the administration's utter disdain for scientific evidence and scientific fact, as displayed in their policies on stem cell research, evolution, global warming, and myriad other issues, isn't it possible that this is Bush yet again thumbing his nose at the scientific community?

I can even hear him saying, "I'll show them doctors who's boss!"

A mind is a terrible thing to use

Two recent stories dominating the press provide metaphors for conservative versions of good and bad citizenship. In Florida, state judges have ordered Terri Schiavo off life support in accordance with her wishes. At the University of Colorado, critics have excoriated Ward Churchill, the tenured professor who supposed that victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center may have been complicit in an economic system in which terrorism is a predictable consequence of huge disparities in cultural, economic and political power.

Why have these two stories been lightening rods for conservatives? Terri Schiavo is a woman who, because of a brain injury, has endured years of hospitalization with neither quality nor human consciousness of life. She exists for the gain of others -- for doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and moralists who profit from her existence while her wishes are ignored. She is not unlike Keanu Reeve's character in The Matrix before he takes the red pill that will open his eyes from a dreamworld and into a reality where his body is nothing more than an energy source for machines which control the world, except that there is no red pill that will bring her back to the world.

Like Shiavo, good citizens, according to this metaphor, don't ask any questions and they don't complain. The good citizen is an instrument for making wealthy people wealthier; she is a passive body used by conservatives to signify their “morality.” However, after the prayer sessions are over, they cut funding for every social program (including stem cell research) that could make a real difference in the lives of people like Terri Schiavo.

If Schiavo is the ideal citizen, then Ward Churchill is the worst kind of citizen. Churchill thinks, asks questions, and expresses doubts for a living. He asks questions that criticize the role of the citizen as a powerless instrument -- a corpus -- for the transfer of wealth and power up the ladder to people and institutions that have no interest in the health, wealth or welfare of the individual. The punishment for that transgression is that conservatives demean his life's work and want to see him lose his job. Don’t pipe up, or else.

Life for the lifeless and no livelihood for the lively -- on the surface these positions are contradictory. However, these two stories have a coherent logic: the good citizen, according to the conservative view, is the person who takes the blue pill, who doesn't act up, who doesn't ask questions, and who is content to remain an instrument for someone else's accumulation of power at the cost of her own.

You hit the nail on the head. A thinking public who ask questions is not in the best interest of government. And in the end, government is interested in what is good for government.

In Schiavo's case, not only has she been a "good citizen", she's now a political prop for Bush and his administration.

The depths to which this administration will go simply astound me.

profits from you economically or politically, the Republicans love you.

At least that's my take on it. . .

Although it does fit nicely with their contempt for science.

Bush is arrogantly telling God: "I'll show you who'se boss!" Very likely to backfire.