These politicians make me sick.
Saturday, May 5, 2007 11:59 a.m. EDT
Giuliani Flips on Schiavo Case In the GOP debate Thursday night, candidate Ruddy Giuliani suggested the Schiavo controversy should have been left to the courts. But when Giuliani visited home county of Terri Schiavo last month, he said he supported the controversial effort by Congress to intervene to keep the severely brain-damaged woman on life support, according to a report in the St. Petersburg Times.
Terri Schiavo died in 2005 at age 41 after a long legal battle between her husband, who said she did not want to be kept alive by artificial means, and her family, who said the judges were effectively starving her to death, and that she could yet recover.
"The family was in dispute. That's what we have courts for. And the better place to decide that in a much more, I think in a much fairer and even in a deeper way, is in front of a court," Giuliani declared at the first GOP presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan library in California.
In April, however, he noted that the controversy had been through the court system for years, adding that the 2005 congressional intervention, "was appropriate to make every effort to give her a chance to stay alive. ... My general view is, you should do everything you can to keep somebody alive unless they have expressed a strong interest in not having very, very special things done, extraordinary things done."
A day after the debate, Giuliani's campaign spokesman, Elliott Bundy attempted to clarify his bosses position on Schiavo:
"Last night Mayor Giuliani said that ideally these types of difficult issues are best left up to families and when there are disputes, it is a matter for the courts to decide. As he said in Florida in April, there are sometimes extraordinary circumstances where the intentions of the person in question are not clear. The Schiavo case was one of those very special circumstances."
"Anybody hurts themselves by being inconsistent on this particular subject," remarked state Rep. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican who led the state legislative efforts to keep Schiavo alive in 2005. "In retrospect, it's not popular to be associated with it, but when you're in the middle of it, you don't deal with whether it's popular, you have to deal with whether it's right."
"Mr. Giuliani needs to figure out what he really believes about these important issues of privacy and the rule of law, " said Derek Newton, a spokesman for Terripac, the political committee started by Terri Schiavo's husband. "But if he believes what he said last - that this issue is a legal one and not a political one - he is squarely in tune with most Americans, and we applaud him."
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/5/5/120348.shtml?s=ic
