Jim Babka's Report on Brayton vs. Klayman

Jim Babka, the host of the radio show I was on a few days ago, has posted a report to his blog on how the show went. It seems he thought it went pretty much the way I thought it went:

Brayton, who argued that the outcome of Terri's case was correct, was well-prepared and forensically strong. I think Mr. Klayman, who was primarily upset with Jeb Bush's failure to intervene and rescue Terri, is used to shorter interviews because after his four or five-bullet point initial statement he crumbled into almost entirely ad hominem arguments. He called one set of judges morons, his opposing guest an idiot (but then quickly corrected himself, and said he meant to say his ideas were idiocy), and so on. The most interesting moment in the show is when the conservative Republican lawyer said, "I don't care what Justice Scalia thinks, he's an intellectual lightweight...one of my least favorite Justices."

Most of the show focused on the role of the Courts. Klayman tried to dodge a question about state sovereignty and federalism, but ultimately conceded that he has little regard for such things when he insisted on the justification that, "Congress does stuff all the time."

Brayton handled my two toughest questions for him, but I wasn't finished with him. There were several things I wanted to ask. He was so confident and forceful he managed to keep Klayman on the defensive the whole time, and I didn't have enough time to ask him the remaining questions I have...

You can read Ed Brayton's opinion of how he thought the show went here. If Larry Klayman ever writes about it, and I find out, I'll link to that as well. But I'm guessing Larry would prefer to forget.

Ouch. Jim did have one question in his post for me that he didn't get to ask me on the air, and I want to address it here because I think it's a good question. He writes:

I still believe starving Terri was nothing short of barbaric. And I would've loved to ask Ed if Michael Schiavo's attorney is mentally ill? After all, he looked at Terri and said she was "peaceful" (a potential statement of fact) and "beautiful."

Beautiful? Someone is starving, their eyes are dark and sunken, their lips are bleeding, and their skin is flaking from dehydration, and you say they look "beautiful?" Sounds to me like Felos is disgustingly infatuated with death.

First, let me say that I think it's absurd that the only legal option is withdrawal of nourishment. The medical evidence may be clear that Terri didn't feel anything during the 13 days she was dehydrating, but it's still absurd to drag the whole process on that long. We wouldn't do that to a dog. The problem is that the same people who were screaming about how barbaric that was would scream even louder if we passed a law allowing active euthenasia, where doctors would administer a lethal dosage in such situations to bring death quickly and painlessly. But that is precisely what we need to allow in such cases.

As far as Mr. Felos is concerned, I had the same reaction Jim did when I saw those comments. I found them downright creepy. And I found them just as delusional and insincere as the comments from the Schindlers that Terri was "crying out to them" and "saying she wants to live." The whole scene at the hospice was creepy to me, from the self-serving media whores like Randall Terry and Jesse Jackson (and yes, Larry Klayman) doing their schtick to the people in the background who would talk on their cell phones and wave excitedly at the TV cameras (that's the way to reinforce the solemn nature of what was going on, eh?) to the family's monk/spokesman who came out at least twice to announce that the family would no longer be talking to the press because they wanted to grieve privately the way families should, only to have those family members booked on every TV show in existence for 3 days after that declaration, to the people sending their kids in to get arrested to make some sort of weird statement. It was a circus we should all be glad has ended.

P.S. I'm not posting this to brag; I'm posting it just in case some other host or producer out there might be reading and be interested in inviting me on their show. I've long subscribed to HL Mencken's description of a writer as "a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His overpowering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men , flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized countries, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression." There's no point in pretending otherwise, or in confining one's yelling and flapping to print.