What Steroids and Schiavo Have in Common...

...is the title of a piece by Ryan Sager at Tech Central Station which does a better job of summing up the problems with the Stupid Party's recent forays into sticking government's snout into people's business.

I've always pointed out that the Left doesn't have a problem with anything they attack the Right for on honest grounds. They're just angry that they are the ones exploiting the system to their own benefit. That's why they refuse to depower government and promote indepedence for real, like the pretend they care to, they want the reins available for their return to the throne.

Anyhoo, here's a good sum up of the pitfalls of activism by phony conservatives:

In coming years, political historians might look back and try to pinpoint the day or week or month that the Republican Party shed the last vestiges of its small-government philosophy. If and when they do, the week just past should make the short list. For it was in this last week that the Republican-controlled Congress made it clear that it sees no area of American life -- none too trivial and none too intimate -- that the federal government should not permeate with its power.

It can all be summed up in two words: steroids and Schiavo.

If there is an issue less deserving of Congressional attention than whether a few overpaid, bat-wielding jocks might have injected themselves with substances to help them wield their bats better, then it has yet to be discovered by the House's Government Reform Committee, which held last week's hearings.

Still, such concerns didn't deter supposed small-government conservative Sen. John McCain from suggesting that "we ought to seriously consider … a law that says all professional sports have a minimum level of performance-enhancing drug testing."

When you're a lawmaker, apparently, every problem seems to cry out for a law.

But if Congress' dealings with the trivial are appalling, they are nothing compared to its exploitation of the tragic.

There, we have the sad case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a "permanent vegetative state" whose feeding tube had been removed at her husband's urging -- and based on a court's findings regarding her wishes on the matter only to have Congress and President Bush intervene ostensibly on her behalf.

Putting aside the tangled facts of the case for the moment -- which include some bitter family history and selective science on both sides -- the driving question here should be: Does Congress have a role?

And when it comes to a family dispute over a painful medical decision, one which at least 19 judges in six courts have already adjudicated, the answer must be a resounding "no."

The forums for matters such as the Schiavo case are state courts, upholding state laws. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives -- who want Roe v. Wade overturned and the issue of abortion moved back to state legislatures and courts -- should understand this better than any other group of Americans.

Conservatives, of course, recognize their hypocrisy. And they're offering up weak rationalizations, like this one from The Wall Street Journal in an editorial Monday: "We'd have more sympathy for this argument if the same liberals who are complaining about the possibility of the federal courts reviewing Mrs. Schiavo's case felt as strongly about restraining the federal judiciary when it comes to abortion, homosexuality, and other social issues they don't want to trust to local communities."

In other words: Our opponents are hypocrites, so we can be, too.

The Journal goes on to argue, rather implausibly, that the federal government has a legitimate role in the Schiavo case because she has been issued a "death sentence," warranting federal review. Alternately, the paper argues, Schiavo may have been deprived of her "due process" rights.

This is all nonsense.

The state is not ordering the killing of Terri Schiavo. Her husband is requesting she be allowed to die, based on her wishes. It is not up to Congress, or the American public, to decide whether they approve of Terri Schiavo's decision.

He trips up at the end there on two points:

1. The State may not be ordering this hit, but they're allowing it to occur.

B. "Her wishes"? Says WHO?!? Terri or the weasel who hopes to profit from her death?!?

THAT is the question that screams out for an answer: Are we going to let men have the unfettered right to murder their women on their say-so alone?!?!

And in a cave somewhere, a Taliban mullah has got to be wondering why he got bombed for advocating what the Left is supporting here now.