Senior moments

They live for these moments, the geezers on the Times-Dispatch editorial board (above), the "Gotchas!" where they expose hypocrisy in the press (in which they, commendably, do not seem to include themselves). Today it's reliable T-D target Howard Dean, whom they take to task--well not him so much as the "commentariat"--for saying "We're going to use Terri Schiavo later on."

Let's leave the "you see! Liberals are just as bad as us!" argument lay and just concentrate on what was said. Do Ross and Co. really think Dean was saying Dems want to "use" Schiavo's death as a rallying point, or rather the fact that Republicans--and Jesse Jackson--made such grandstanding asses of themselves inserting the congress of the United States into what any decent conservative would view as a state's rights issue?

It doesn't matter how you feel about the Schiavo case; Like it or not, "Terri Schiavo" has become shorthand for a particularly weird period in American politics, and just because 3/4 of the T-D ed board is kept alive by iron lungs and IV bile drips doesn't justify a persistent vegetative state on the penultimate page of section A.