Look, I’ve had a very bad week which has distracted me from all of this Schiavo stuff. I need to read and think more about all of it. But I think it’s fair to say I’m not exactly on the same page with a lot of my conservative friends and colleagues on many of the issues involved. I’ll write more on the issue later. But I have to say I’m disgusted with the faux moral outrage from liberals who are stunned by the idea that the federal government might get involved in issues like this. This is the party which danced a jig over the Violence Against Women Act and which has defined a vast swath of its political raison d’etre around the idea that the federal government should jealously guard the right to abortion and the right to appeal a death sentence in federal courts. And it is now scandalized that the Republican Party is trying to prevent a state court from killing a woman. It’s okay for Washington to meddle when a husband slaps his wife, but it’s outrageous when Washington tries to stop a husband from killing his wife? It’s mandatory that a federal judge make sure a minority isn’t passed-over for a promotion, but it’s a rejection of the rule of law for a federal judge to make sure that a woman isn’t wrongfully starved to death? Thanks to the hard work of Democrats states can’t set their own drinking age or voting age, but suddenly state judges should be The Word of God when it comes to slowly killing citizens. I don’t get it.

I do think conservative Republicans are at a minimum inconsistent in their sudden love of the fourteenth amendment and an activist federal government. But liberals are no less inconsistent in their sudden love of states’ rights on such issues. The difference is that Republicans are embracing a principle they’ve spent some time upholding — a culture of life — while Democrats are spending most of their time whining about the “hypocrisy” of their opponents. I would respect the Democrats more if they had the courage to argue that Terri should die. That is their position.