Boy, that was inconvenient . . .

Just imagine it: Katherine Kersten is hunched over her Underwood, pecking away at the last draft of her column for Thursday the 16th. It's a real stem winder about how Terri Schiavo was murdered, timed to coincide with a Twin Cities convention of the National Right to Life Committee.

Then, the day before the column was to run, the medical examiners who did Ms. Schiavo's autopsy had a televised news conference and did their version of Monty Python's dead parrot routine. Profoundly damaged brain, no hope of recovery, incontrovertibly blind (contrary to the video finding of Dr. Senator Frist), a persistent vegetative state. Yes folks, the lights were on, but nobody was home. Terri, like Polly, had passed.

And no sign of the abuse alleged by the foam-flecked zealots who wanted to continue play buskashi with the tragic and insensible Terri Schiavo. What's a columnist, especially an ideologue like Kersten, to do? You run the column anyway, of course. That's the great thing about rigid ideology; it is such a good substitute for thinking.

Kersten conjures up the jack-booted guard at Ms. Schiavo's bed preventing anyone, including her family, from reinserting the feeding tube. Why was a guard necessary? Because some people were not willing to accept the decision of most of the state judges in Florida (every one that heard the case, anyway, and that was quite a few), and the federal courts, too, that Terri Schiavo, the person, was already dead.

The effort to keep that hopeless hulk of a person breathing is not a culture of life; it is voodoo. Instead of being so worried about the undead and Snowflake Americans, it would be refreshing to see people like Katherine Kersten (and let's not forget Michele Bachmann, who sponsored legislation in the wake of the Schiavo case to compel that bodies be kept breathing when their souls have departed) to show a little concern for people who are actually alive and sentinent.

Spotty believes that it is ironic that people who profess to have the strongest belief in an afterlife are the most afraid of death.