The Ghoulies
Posted by James Wolcott
"Your heart goes out to them," said Margaret Carlson on this weekend's Capital Gang (CNN), that lifeboat for clueless pundits.
By "them," Carlson meant the parents of Terri Schiavo. Carlson (how the hell does she have a career?) had been so effusive in praise of them and so abusive in disparagement of Michael Schiavo that Robert Novak commended her after she paused for breath, which is like being kissed by a vampire who's removed his fangs.
Of course, it's easy for your heart to go out to people when it's untethered from your brain, and Carlson's brain has never been a wonder of science.
My heart (and I do have one, despite what you may read on the cave walls of Lascaux) doesn't go out to that pair of publicity-grabbing fireplugs, who comported themselves with a complete lack of dignity compared to the husband and demonstrated their demagogic bad faith over the last two weeks.
The so-called press conferences they do in front of the hospice, for example. A press conference, even in the Bush era, is supposed to incorporate questions from the press. Not with the Schindlers. The cable news correspondents announce that the Schindlers and their friar homies are about to hold a press conference, whereupon the Schindler camp forms this strange human choo-choo train toward the nest of microphones. Then as momma or poppa makes a terse statement, flanked by Randall Terry and the friars making their sad-determined faces. Sometimes the father uses phrases like "judicial homicide" that sound less like those of a grieving father than of someone who's been well prepped by his rightwing handlers. Last night the mother appealed to Michael's new partner, guilt-tripping her with references to the two children they have together, to devote herself to them and let her have her daughter back.
Then, entertaining no questions, they reformed the choo-choo train and chugged off stage right.
Sayeth Steve Gilliard:
"These are sleazy, controlling people who will stop at nothing to get their way.
"They have benefitted from unprecedented contributions and have not uttered one word of thanks and only belatedly tried to control the freak show outside their daughter's hospice. I would be amazingly unsurprised if the Schindlers were sued by the families of other patients for that circus outside...
"You know I want to sympathize with them, but at every turn, they do something even sleazier and more revolting. They should have stopped the children from being arrested. That hurt them. Badly. Then Mary Schindler's creepy appeal tonight to "have her daughter". She was a married woman. Not her property. Now, the sale of the [online donor] list and the allegations of abuse...
"How sleazy are these people, why have they lost my sympathy in this horrible situation? Because they said nothing when people picketed Michael Schiavo's house when his kids and girlfriend are there. They have never once discouraged violence. And they have not even thanked the politicians for their support...
"Character in crisis always shines through. Michael Schiavo has not raised money, not appealed to anyone's emotions and has been through eight years of torture from his inlaws, who have done everything possible to malign him and his motives on the scantest evidence."
Even sleazier than the Schindler parents (son Bobby's no picnic either) are the cable news anchors, guests, and pundits who are proof that there is no governing ethic in TV news anymore--the only thing that matters are ratings and not getting sued.
Just this morning the appalling Nancy Grace railed on Imus's MSNBC show that Terri Schiavo was "turning and twisting in pain" and nobody was doing anything about it. I have no heard a single medical expert or visitor to her room claim that she's showing any signs of physical anguish. That was something Nancy Grace just pulled out of imaginative ass and Don Imus, who can rampage for days on the finest details of the "vicious hatchetjob" the Wall Street Journal did on him, was too dumbfuck even to call her on it.
And then there's Joe Scarborough. Because I have a heart, I removed a couple of pages from by book Attack Poodles about the death of Lori Klausitis, a young staffer for then Republican Congressman Scarborough whose body was discovered in his district office. He was in Washington, DC at the time of her death, but there were some iffy aspects about her case and unlike the Gary Condit situation, this mini-mystery got no play in the national media since it didn't plug into the horny Clinton Democrats-interns meme. I wrote about it in a Vanity Fair column but when I reworked the column for the book, its inclusion bothered me; there was something tonally wrong about it that clashed with the rest of the text, and I heard that Scarborough had been upset about it when it came out and that it caused distress to his new family. I had also heard from more than one person that he was not a bad guy off camera, funny and unpretentious, which also tilted towards leniency. I felt I could make my points about him as a TV personality without the passage, so I cut it, and hearing second-hand he was concerned about the book, called him up to tell him so. We had a very pleasant, brief conversation, and that was it.
I still don't regret cutting it, but I really think it's the last time I'm cutting anyone on the other side the slightest slack. Joe Scarborough may be a nice guy off-camera, but his performance in the Schiavo case has been one of the most disgusting stretches in cable-news history--the biggest blotch on MSNBC's record since the hiring/firing of Michael Savage, and you would have thought Rick Kaplan would have learned something from the blunder of his predecessor instead of letting Scarborough lash and trash night after night. He has become such an odious, poisonous joke that his own guests are telling him, "You should be ashamed of the show you are running" (scroll down), and asking, "How can you possibly be so stupid?"
Joe Scarborough is just a symptom, a noisy, ignorant, pimply symptom to be sure, but still. The real malefactors are the men in executive suits and suites who put such a bozo on the air and allow him to plant his shoes on the dying body of Terri Schiavo and use her as a political soapbox and religious pulpit. It's conservatives who are dehydrating her, draining every last drop of dignity from her death.
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