I just heard President Bush give another of his rousing Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! speeches on television. I don't know who he is speaking to this time; all I know is that the message never changes. I'm beginning to cringe every single time I hear the word freedom. It's becoming over-exposed.

What surprised me was that I also couldn't stand to look at President Bush. I haven't had that problem before. But listening to him talk about freedom when in the early hours of this morning he signed a bill whose intent is to keep a helpless woman prisoner for God only knows how long inside her useless cell of a body made me want to throw up. This is the hypocrisy my Liberal friends have been telling me about for years, and I never saw it this clearly for myself.

I've been a conservative most of my adult life. I find myself naturally siding with the conservative side of political issues; I don't have to be talked into that point of view, and I can defend it believing that there are good points to be made. But not this time.

The Terri Schiavo case has no business becoming a political football. If the House and Senate insist upon tossing around a hot potato or a spitball, let them stick with steroids in baseball. Just leave Terri Schiavo alone. Her case has been decided, and just because consevatives don't like the outcome of her case doesn't make it less legal or wrong.

No matter how many times Tom DeLay fires off the charges of the cratz wanting to "kill Terri", and no matter how many times Bill Frist lends his cardiology medical expertise to a neurological medical problem, the bottom line remains that what they want to do is condemn Terri Schiavo to an indeterminate time trapped inside a useless body. She will not get better.

What infuriates me more than anything else is how casually Frist and DeLay and others like them declare that the only thing Terri Schiavo can't do is feed herself. That's an outright, bold faced lie. Terri Schiavo can do absolutely nothing for herself. If she wanted to roll over in bed, and her cognitive responses have been shown to preclude even that, she cannot. She cannot comb her hair, brush her teeth, wash her face, take a bath, wipe her own behind, talk, sing, speak, and the list goes on and on. Doctors who have examined her say her cerebral cortex is gone. When that happens, there's just no 'there' there.

Those who claim to know so much about Terri without ever having spent so much as 30 seconds in the same room with her show their ignorance about more than simply Terri herself. They show their stupidity about her overall condition and about the death process.

Try going without food and water for more than 48 hours. A fully cognitive person will find that very difficult and will not be cheerful. So how could it be, according to reports from Terri's mother, that when Mom went to see Terr after Terri had been nutritionally and hydration deprived (gotta love those euphemisms), Terri was just the same as she always is. Very happy to see her mother. Very aware. Very wanting to live. Her family even tried to pass off the notion that at one point Terri managed to say, " I waaaaaaaaaaaaah", but wouldn't you just know it, someone came along and interrupted her before she could finish saying "I waaaaaaaaaaaaaaahnt to live." Those people either have no shame or have lost their own intelligence. They are now tape recording Terri's gutteral shrieks and playing them for television stations to use as "exclusive" Terri quotes.

Terri Schiavo is not cognizant. Her case has been reviewed in the Florida courts for 8 years with 19 judges. The US Supreme Court has refused to hear this case. It has been decided. Except conservatives with an agenda of their own don't want to accept that. And to further their agenda they will sentence a helpless woman to a useless life she has stated she never wanted.

I used to be proud to be conservative, and at some point I may feel that way again. But not today.