Bush Disgusting

Terri Schiavo's husband on Bush super PAC ad: 'Disgusting'

By Nolan D. McCaskill

The husband of Terri Schiavo is slamming a pro-Jeb Bush super PAC for invoking her in an ad touting the former Florida governor's record as a social conservative.

Right to Rise USA released an ad this week that will air in South Carolina (BuzzFeed first reported the ad). In it, a narrator highlights Bush’s record with the National Rifle Association before shifting to religion. “He’s a man of deep faith who fought time and again for the right to life,” the narrator says.

A dozen seconds into the 30-second spot, as the narrator touts Bush’s faith, the video shows an image of Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman whose feeding tube was pulled in March 2005 after a long saga that became national news. She was medically in a persistent vegetative state and died later that month. More than 15 years prior, her husband, Mike Schiavo, had discovered her unresponsive body lacking a pulse inside their St. Petersburg, Florida, home.

“It is simply disgusting that Jeb Bush and his super PAC would exploit my wife’s tragedy for his crude political gain,” Schiavo said in a statement. “Shame on Jeb Bush.”

In an interview with POLITICO, he repeatedly calling the ad “disgusting.” “It sounds like it’s a last-ditch effort to get the right-wing constituents,” he added.

Terri Schiavo’s parents maintained that she was conscious and should be kept alive, though her husband disagreed, asserting that his wife wouldn’t want to live in that condition. Bush was injected into the controversy, ultimately filing a federal court brief, signing legislation and issuing an executive order in an effort to keep her alive.

“Using his disgraceful intervention in our family’s private trauma to advance his political career shows that he has learned nothing,” Mike Schiavo continued in the statement. “He’s proud of the fact that he used the machinery of government to keep a person alive through extraordinary artificial means — contrary to the orders of the court that were based on the court's determination, made over six years of litigation, that doing so would be against her wishes.

"What the campaign video shows is that if he ever got his hands on the power of government again, he would do the same thing again, maybe next time to your family.”