William Frist Did Not Kill Kenny on South Park

Frank Rich at the Times watches South Park, and the publication of the new book South Park Conservatives by Brian Anderson spurs Rich to analyze the problem of being a "cool" conservative. Republicans look at Jon Stewart and others who have catalyzed a thoroughly hip new liberal media, and ask themselves ... what can we latch onto to be cool? The answer, Anderson hypothesized when he sent his book off to press a year or so ago, is South Park. It pokes fun at all sorts of liberal excesses, and has been awfully cool doing so.

So what does this have to do with bioethics? Rich points out that during the months that Anderson's book has been gestating at its publisher, South Park has made a shift, leaving conservatives in an awkward position. Why? Because South Park turned on the Republicans over the Schiavo case:

In the March 30 episode, Kenny, a kid whose periodic death is a "South Park" ritual, lands in a hospital in a "persistent vegetative state" and is fed through a tube. The last page of his living will is missing. Demonstrators and media hordes descend. Though heavenly angels decree that "God intended Kenny to die" rather than be "kept alive artificially," they are thwarted by Satan, whose demonic aide advises him to "do what we always do - use the Republicans." Soon demagogic Republican politicians are spewing sound bites ("Removing the feeding tube is murder") scripted in Hell. But as in the Schiavo case, they don't prevail. Kenny is allowed to die in peace once his missing final wish is found: "If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don't ever show me in that condition on national television."

This remarkably prescient scenario, first broadcast on the eve of Terri Schiavo's death, anticipated just how far the zeitgeist would swing in the month after the right's overreach in her case. A USA Today poll a week later found that Americans by 55 to 40 percent believe that "Republicans, traditionally the party of limited government, are 'trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans' on moral values." In other words, what Hillary Clinton's overreaching big-government health care plan did to the Democrats a decade ago is the whammy the Schiavo case has inflicted on the G.O.P. today.

[thanks Wayne Shelton]