This & That, Ceci et Cela

Holy hypocrisy in this cult of life:

After participating in the frenzy that was the Schiavo case, Jeb Bush’s minions are now fighting to stop state aid for young Marissa Amora — four years after they sought a court order to let her die following a savage beating, The Palm Beach Post reports. What’s more, these same minions — the Department of Children and Families — could have prevented the beating, which left Marissa permanently disabled.

In late 2000, Marissa was hospitalized for a month. Doctors and nurses saw telltale signs of past beatings — and witnessed her neglectful mother abusing her in the hospital. They pleaded for DCF to intervene. But the agency, perhaps mindful of Jeb’s fierce public championing of “family values,” declined to step in.

Then came the inevitable: A few weeks later, Marissa was back in the hospital, beaten nearly to death, with severe injuries to her brain and liver and several broken bones. Now the DCF took an interest: They rushed to court to obtain a “Do Not Resuscitate” order for the mangled 2-year-old. For God’s sake, don’t let her live, the DCF told Marisa’s doctors, because she might “potentially” be left “in a vegetative state.”

But the doctors disagreed with the Bushists’ expert diagnosis. And so Marissa is still alive today — brain-damaged, crippled, fed through a stomach tube, but alert, talkative, happy, with a new foster mother. Indeed, she would seem to be a shining example of the “culture of life” that we hear so much about these days from certain pulpit-pounding politicians. But to Jeb and the DCF, she’s just a “useless eater,” a budgetary burden, a mistake to be flushed away. Without state aid, her new family will sink beneath the staggering cost of Marissa’s treatment — and the decent life that she’s clawed back from the hellhole Jeb left her in years ago will wither on the vine.

‘Tis passing strange. After all, this is the same agency — and the same governor — that just fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the long-brain-dead Terri Schiavo existing in a very real “vegetative state.”