I tape The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for several reasons. First, like many others, I’m distrustful of mainstream press and news analyst spin doctors who toil for vested interests. There’s no hope of balanced, objective journalism from those favoured few “imbedded” in the scene. Also, mainstream news is depressing. Its prime focus is to keep us down, threatened, unsure, willing to abandon freedom to bigger brothers who infer that they will keep us safe, provided we play along if they bend the rules. The “you’re either with us or against us” syndrome.

One big brother is the medical profession. Another is government. Sometimes these two get into squabbles. Thus, I was anxious to see how The Daily Show would deal with the controversy surrounding the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. The latest result is that the courts have denied an emergency request from her parents, debated in Congress and backed by the White House.

The game is played here with a simple code written on the patient’s chart: DNR, which stands for Do Not Resuscitate. The doctor, hopefully in consultation with next of kin, determines that the patient be allowed to go gentle into that night without undue effort to keep the person alive. This has become the issue with Schiavo, and has forced us to become aware of the “living will,” which allows one to answer the following questions:

Who do you want to make health care decisions for you when you can't make them?

What kind of medical treatment you want or not want? How comfortable do you want to be and how you want people to treat you? What do you want your loved ones to know?

Terri Schiavo does not have a living will. Her husband fought legally for years to have the tube removed because she would not want to be kept alive artificially and has no hope for recovery, but her parents contend that she responds to them and that her condition could improve. Brain-damaged in 1990 when her heart stopped briefly, she breathes on her own, but relies on a feeding tube to sustain her. Court-appointed doctors claim that she is in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. Schiavo could survive one to two weeks without the feeding tube.

This set the scene for Stewart and, as usual, The Daily Show did not duck the thorny issue, but met it head on. His first diatribe concerning Congress meeting on the weekend: “Oh my god, we’re getting universal health care!”

Next, Rep. James Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin: “The measure of a nation to commit the sanctity of life is reflected with its laws and to the extent those laws honour and defend its most vulnerable citizens.” Lamenting that the law was not universal and applied only to Schiavo, Stewart followed with a montage of politicians referring to her by her first name. “Imagine what they’d call her if they ever met her or knew her or seen her in person?” asked Stewart.

Then, he followed with, “If you want to know how sick you have to be for Congress to improve health care, that old diabetes and asthma thing your kid has…”

The Daily Show delights in exposing hypocrisy. Republican Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Bill Frist, a surgeon, offered his considered medical opinion based solely upon viewing news videotape. “It doesn’t look like she is in a persistent vegetative state.” Sadly, with this facile diagnosis, he appeared to be the vegetable.

Stewart, on a roll, showed footage of George Bush arriving via helicopter, saying that “it was a miracle that the president cut his vacation short from his home in Crawford, Texas to sign the bill.”

He then interviewed “Senior Ethicist,” Dr. Stephen Colbert, a regular on the show, who admitted that the Republicans seemed to be moving against their core principles regarding states’ rights, but that now they did control the federal government, and after all, the “problem with the courts is that sometimes they make decisions that you don’t like; then, you have to take action.”

The pitiful component of all this is that while those espousing platitudes argue, someone must painfully starve to death over a period of two weeks, the same sort of agony that people endure in the last stages of cancer, unless you are fortunate to have a doctor willing to buck the system and inject you with a heavy dose of morphine.

We stand by and watch friends commit longitudinal suicide with fast food diets, addictions to drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, but when someone like Sue Rodriguez wanted to die with dignity in 1992, Justice Allen Melvin of the B.C. Supreme Court denied her the right to doctor-assisted suicide. You may recall that only one politician intervened, Sven Robinson.

If you haven’t viewed the movie, Million Dollar Baby, I recommend that you check it out. You might get a better feel for what’s happening to Terri Schiavo.