In between playing and working this weekend, I tried to keep up with the Terri Schiavo case, mostly via Fox News on my hotel's cable TV and the Blogosphere. I think that this piece by Herb Meyer in The American Thinker has the right take: in many ways, the Schiavo case is the second coming of Elian Gonzales:

In each case, the victim is under the legal control of a man who is no longer living with the victim, who in fact has run off with another woman and fathered her children, and who no longer plays an active role in the victim’s life. In Terri’s case, this is her husband. In Elian’s case, it’s his father. Moreover, in each case there are people willing and able to care for the victim – Terri’s parents; Elian’s relatives in Miami. Yet in each case, the man with legal control insists that the victim be harmed – Terri killed, Elian shipped back to Castro’s Cuba.

Numerous pundits made the case in late 2000 and early 2001 that by shipping Elian back to Cuba, Bill Clinton paved the way for Al Gore's narrow defeat in Florida, which puts double pressure--at least symbolically--on Republicans on this issue.

Update: James Taranto asks, "What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?":

Why do those of us who aren't right-to-life absolutists side with Mrs. Schiavo's parents, who want to keep her alive, over her husband, who wants her dead? It's a fair question, and it raises another one: What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?

According to news reports, Mr. Schiavo lives with a woman named Jodi Centonze, and they have two children together. Surely any court would consider this prima facie evidence of adultery. And this is no mere fling; a sympathetic 2003 profile in the Orlando Sentinel described Centonze as Mr. Schiavo's "fiancée." Mr. Schiavo, in other words, has virtually remarried. Short of outright bigamy, his relationship with Centonze is as thoroughgoing a violation of his marriage vows as it is possible to imagine.

The point here is not to castigate Mr. Schiavo for behaving badly. It would require a heroic degree of self-sacrifice for a man to forgo love and sex in order to remain faithful to an incapacitated wife, and it would be unreasonable to hold an ordinary man to a heroic standard.

But it is equally unreasonable to let Mr. Schiavo have it both ways. If he wishes to assert his marital authority to do his wife in, the least society can expect in return is that he refrain from making a mockery of his marital obligations.

Taranto concludes, "The grimmest irony in this tragic case is that those who want Terri Schiavo dead are resting their argument on the fiction that her marriage is still alive."

Another Update: James Lileks also views Terri Schiavo's case as being similar to Elian's. Meanwhile, I don't know how well Michael Schiavo's ultra-overheated rhetoric in this article from today's St. Petersburg Times is playing to the public, but it's not winning me over to his side of the issue. Neither is this.

One More Update: OK, maybe it's not Elian Gonzales Part II. This InstaPundit post includes a letter from a reader who suggests that maybe it's the return of the Chandra Levy case.

And the calm before another 9/11-sized storm.