Using Idiots and Pulling Polls

Robert Tracinski of TIA Daily recently made the point that social conservatives have been deliberately lying to promote their theocratic agenda in the guise of saving the life of Terri Schiavo. Speaking of Ann Coulter, he says the following:

[T]his case has revealed the profoundly totalitarian impulses of the religious right.

The latest is a scandalous column from shrill conservative polemicist Ann Coulter. Aside from promulgating an endless procession of factual falsehoods about the case and making libelous accusations against Michael Schiavo [italics added], Coulter approvingly quotes this declaration of lawlessness from one of America's worst presidents:

"President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said of a Supreme Court ruling he opposed: 'Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.' The court's ruling was ignored. And yet, somehow, the republic survived."

Others have noted the continuing threat of attack upon our judiciary, notably by Tom DeLay, who wishes to impeach judges for doing their jobs. Fortunately, it looks like Dick Cheney doesn't agree with him, though I would have liked one principled statement to the two wishy-washy sounding ones we got, like the following.

Cheney was asked about the issue on Friday by the editorial board of the New York Post. He said twice that he had not seen DeLay's remarks, but the vice president said he would "have problems" with the idea of retribution against the courts. "I don't think that's appropriate," he said. "I may disagree with decisions made by judges in any one particular case. But I don't think there would be much support for the proposition that because a judge hands down a decision we don't like, that somehow we ought to go out -- there's a reason why judges get lifetime appointments."

But what of the continuing attack on the truth from the pundits of the religious right? Yesterday, I talked about how the religous right is rallying its soldiers to fight again for theocracy. But will they fight for a blatant lie? Most will not, and so one task of the punditocracy of the social conservatives is to give their case a patina of objectivity since the rank-and-file have at least a nodding acquaintance with that notion.

Notable among the right-wing pundits who favored reinsertion of the tube was Michelle Malkin, whose blog had become so saturated with the story that she felt a need to at least try to lighten things up a bit. Has Schiavo's death brought about a return to normalcy? Or a dispassionate look at what might constitute a persistent vegetative state (PVS)? Or a consideration of why so many polls showing Americans disapproved of the actions of Bush and the Congress to "save" this "life?" Or even, beyond passing mention ("Captain Ed has some wise words of caution."), one jot of concern for the legal ramifications of this maneuver? The answer is, of course, a resounding, "No!"

Since the debacle, Malkin has, in fact, acted to further perpetuate the myths that (1) Terri Schiavo was not in a PVS and (2) the American people "really" supported reinserting the tube, or would have, had they known the "facts" of the case or not been subjected to a push-poll. I have already blogged about both of these issues, and before the death of Schiavo's body. Let's reconsider each in turn.

In a column that started out as a reasonable attack on the methodology of one Schiavo poll conducted by ABC, Malkin ends by cobbling together unreliable evidence (and dismissing the opinions of physician specialists) to make the case that Schiavo was not devoid of consciousness. I suggested that she might consider looking to physicians and researchers rather than Schiavo's parents and various unspecified "caregivers" when attempting to judge Schiavo's medical condition.

Malkin should take note: Those strange letters appended to these "experts'" names, like "M.D." or "Ph.D." aren't the cryptic foreign abbreviations of leftist guerilla organizations in cahoots with MSM. They're credentials.

Well, she has at least pretended to take this advice, albeit poorly. In a post titled, "A Challenge to Schiavo's Neurologists," she publicized a wager by a crank radiologist. Here's the challenge, in Malkin's words:

The CodeBlue blogger is putting his money where his mouth is and "offering $100,000 on a $25,000 wager for ANY neurologist (and $125,000 for any neurologist/bioethicist) involved in Terri Schiavo's case--including all the neurologists reviewed on television and in the newspapers who can accurately single out PVS patients from functioning patients with better than 60% accuracy on CT scans."

He'll provide 100 single cuts from 100 different patient's brain CT's. All the neurologist has to do is say which ones represent patients with PVS and which do not. If the neurologist can be right 6 out of 10 times he wins the $100,000.

Any takers? Hmmmm?

This is ridiculous on its face. Yes. The blogger Malkin cites does point out earlier that, "Here's the problem with these experts: THEY DON'T INTERPRET CT SCANS OF THE BRAIN. RADIOLOGISTS DO." But who makes the diagnosis of PVS? As the crank from CodeBlue might write it: "NEUROLOGISTS DO." Idiot. Would any doctor worth his salt make a diagnosis of something as complex as PVS on the basis of just brain scans? I doubted it enough that I'd originally intended to avail myself of the medical library at work to find out what the exact diagnostic criteria for PVS were.

No need. Steve Collins, M.D. (In this case, the cryptic abbreviation implies a high degree of medical training.) over at the American Thinker has blogged about the Schiavo case. While he does not go into excruciating detail, he confirms my suspicion that it takes more than a lone CRANK RADIOLOGIST looking at a couple of BRAIN SCANS and SLAPPING DOWN A DIAGNOSIS IN ALL CAPS WITH A CRAYON to reach the conclusion that a patient has PVS.

It is difficult, if not meaningless for a physician to make a diagnosis, of "persistent vegetative state"on the basis of a head CT scan alone. Physicians, in general, do not rely on a single test to make a diagnosis. [emphasis mine] In fact in medical school they are generally taught that approximately 60-70% of a diagnosis relies on the patient's history, 10% on the physical/neurological exam, 10% on lab tests and 10% on radiological studies such as X-rays and CT scans.

Read the whole thing. It's a good summary for the layman. The interested reader can read even more at Free Republic, where an article on PVS from the New England Journal of Medicine has been posted. Knock yourself out, but if you wind up in a hospital, you might ask for a transfer if you see that your radiologist makes marks all over your charts in blue crayon and in ALL CAPS. (Sorry to go off so much on the chap, but he asked for it.) So Mrs. Malkin, the reason there aren't any takers is probably that the various experts you keep describing with scare quotes really are experts and wouldn't make a diagnosis based on such thin evidence. Their refusal to take the bet is not evidence in your favor. In fact, it is further evidence against your particular method of evaluating the medical condition of Terri Schiavo. Are you that gullible or do you hope that your readers are? I suspect the second, but this post makes that a tough call. Jesting aside, there are only three possibilities here. (1) Malkin is remarkably unqualified to discuss medical issues, (2) Malkin is placing what she wants to believe higher than evidence, or (3) she is deceiving her readers. Sloppy, nonobjective, or deceitful: take your pick.

Moving on to polls. Malkin makes much of a new Zogby poll that she purports to contradict all the other polls taken on this case. In "An Honest Schiavo Poll," Malkin quotes another report:

Another Zogby question [bears] directly on Terri's circumstances.

"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water," the poll asked.

A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.

Absent from the cited report, Malkin's post, or a David Limbaugh post on the subject is whether most Americans viewed Schiavo as being in a coma (correctly or not) or being terminally ill or being on a form of "life support." Furthermore, if the following question was asked, "If you were Terri Schiavo, would you have wanted to be kept alive?" none of these three mentioned the results. An even more glaring omission, either from the above poll or this reporting, is the more important question of whether the American people favored what Bush and the Congress did! (And, in the manner of Malkin, might I suggest explaining just what a bad precedent this would set before asking the question. They need to know the facts of the case, after all.) Americans are remarkably able to separate what they wish to be done from what they know ought to be done by their government. But then, the near-total absence of these concerns from her blog shows me that Malkin cares less about such niceties than the social conservative agenda. Within its scope, this poll was probably just as "fair" as the others, but Malkin is twisting the meaning of its results.

So, as I have said before, Schiavo's death changes nothing. When one's ideas are devoid of rationality, there are no lessons to be learned. When one's ideas remain in a persistent vegetative state, there is nothing left but to make them appear animate, as if derived from facts and so patently rational as to be almost beneath the need for proof. This way, these ideas will be adopted and kept alive, much like Terri Schiavo had to be. Unfortunately, unlike Terri Schiavo, these ideas are not harmless. Their continued existence threatens us all. Expect the religious right to keep their brain-dead ideas alive in the culture in this manner, and expect them to try to get the government involved in doing so. Schiavo was not a human being to them after all, but the incarnation of their ideas.

-- CAV