OK, I take it back

I take back what I said about giving props to Jeb Bush for being a cooler head prevailing. Looks like he sent in the jackbooted thugs after all:

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Herald has learned.

Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.

For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called ``a showdown.''

In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

''We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,'' said a source with the local police.

''The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,'' said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. ``When the sheriff's department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.''

The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday's events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it.

Swell. Now we have state law enforcement damn near getting into an altercation with local law enforcement.

Regardless of where you stand on the fate of Terri Schiavo herself (and frankly, I wish she would wake up right now and tell us what she thinks), this is madness. Law-and-order Republicans are no longer talking about the rule of law; no longer talking about how "the system worked", no longer having any respect for the justice system, even when the decisions are coming down from conservative judges. Instead, they're advocating mob rule.

And these are the people who made their name on respecting less government and the rule of law?