UnCommon Sense TV receives occasional feedback, some is praise, some is thoughtful criticism. The following email was in a different category, however. Here it is (sic), along with a reply:

You are obviouly desperate to get attention with silly attacks heres a fact ted kennedy got lots of press for mary joe, and he’s been fine ,,terri schiavo is dead did your view of the constituition defend her?

Dear viewer,

I really don’t think it is productive to respond to this, but I’m tempted because you are participating (I hope unwittingly) in milking the Schiavo tragedy to political advantage.

You obviously never had a relative wasting away in a medically irreparable state. I remember how hard it was for me to let go of my mom, but she had made her wishes very clear, she wanted to be classified as DNR, and not to have a feeding tube. When she was laying in bed dying, I would have done anything to have her live for one more month, week, even day. But it would have been so unfair to her, and even though she had no living will, she had let everyone in the family know her views on artificial life support- she only wanted it if it could lead to recovery and a return to normal living. I can imagine the heart wrenching misery of both Terri Schiavo’s husband and parents. I understand from my personal experience the desire of her parents to keep her alive regardless of the prison her body and brain had become, the frustration of her husband and the struggles they all must have gone through. What an awful situation, and then along comes the political agenda of people like Randall Terry– and Tom DeLay, who was obviously using his righteous posturing to avoid being scrutinized for some less-than-righteous behavior in another region of ethics, that of the public trust in elected officials.

Politics aside, my answer is YES, the Constitution did defend Terri Schiavo, and it has nothing to do with “my view” of the Constitution. The rights it provided come from the long tradition of English legal precedent that traces back to the Magna Carta, a tradition which the theocratic right is determined to replace with the “divinely inspired” judgment of a bevy of Ayatollahs like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Randall Terry, et al. If the parents had wanted to remove the tube and her husband did not, should the court have allowed them to intervene then? Do you see the inconsistency here? Judicial tradition respects the sanctity of marriage. I could be disingenuous (like a congressman on a talk show) and ask you if you would prefer that it didn’t protect the sanctity of marriage, but I sense that your opinion on this matter is not based on the consistency or Constitutionality of court decisions, but rather on an emotional grasp of medical ethics.

As for Edward Kennedy, he was a drunk who ran into a lake and failed to call the police when his passenger was drowning. As much as I may think of his politics, of which I take a mixed view, you will not get me to defend his behavior, nor that of any of the rest of the spoiled brats sprinkled among his extended family. But for the life of me I can’t see how that has anything to do with the facts we present on our show, or with our opinions about those facts, or with the Schiavo tragedy.

Apparently you are laboring under the mistaken impression that we are loyal and uncritical members of the Democratic Party. Let me assure you, if the Democrats were in charge, and behaving the way these guys are behaving, I would be expressing the same attitude toward them. One of the flaws in partisanship is that in a political party you are aligned with human beings, many of whom do not have the ethical perspective or common sense to restrain themselves from baser impulses. We are small “d” democrats (and small “r” republicans) , certainly, but that is as far as it goes. No one who cares about the health of our republic could be anything but disappointed in the Democrats over the last fifty years. For myself, I am certainly an admirer of many (not all) elements of the New Deal, and I think that a retreat into the 19th century model of laissez-faire capitalism is an indulgence in fantasy at the expense of reality. Things that happen on the scale of the industrial and post-industrial economies need SOME DEGREE of public guidance. (Our politics ought to be openly about how much guidance much that should be, not about whether people have guns, condoms, or religious paraphernalia in their homes)

Since WWII especially, Democrats have succumbed to some of the worst political impulses, including corruption, failure to stand on principle, opportunism, and many others, as the Republicans are doing now. I do not agree with many of the philosophical underpinnings of the Republican Party, but I would have a lot more respect for them if they actually lived by them. I will never forget the rhetoric Newt Gingrich used to stir up (often deserved) righteous indignation against Congressional Democrats in the mid 1990s. It was easy, with the likes of Dan Rostenkowski and Bill Clinton floating around. Now the worm has turned. Seems the Contract with America wasn’t so revolutionary after all, just business as usual with a multifaceted campaign of propaganda and rhetoric designed to deflect attention from the self-serving behavior of the new regime.

Unfortunately, George Washington’s dream of a republic without political parties was never realized; the answer to that has to be more political parties, not fewer. Right now, the radical extremists have taken over the GOP, and I will use any tool at my disposal to help dislodge them from power, including the Democratic Party, but I have no illusions about the Democrats as an organization. Without serious reforms in the funding of public elections and in the stranglehold the two major parties have on the process, we will never fully realize the potential for democracy that this nation has. There are many ways to this end, several of which we have summarized and discussed on our show.

We are at a crucial point in world history, at which the role of the USA will be cast for at least a century. If we fail to behave responsibly, and continue to act as though the future will be just like the past, we will fall into the landfill of history as more coherent (not more desirable) leadership supplants us on the world stage. I don’t know if that is what the Busheviks want to see, but they are doing all they can to make it real, and sooner rather than later.
The Busheviks MUST GO!
They must go for the survival of the nation.
They must go because they are destroying the stability of people’s lives.
They must go because their religious intolerance foments attacks against the U.S. Constitution.
They must go for the survival of democracy and of republican government in the world.
They must go to prevent the ascension of outright global tyranny akin to that of the “Christian” European monarchs of centuries past.
They must go because they are ruining the Earth.

Ed Lacy
UnCommon Sense TV