posted on August 14, 2004 01:50:19 PM new
> Subject: As appearing in Esquire Magazine current issue
>
> The Case Against George W. Bush
>
> By Ron Reagan
>
> It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes
> clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it
> was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify
> such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their
> long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt.
> Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely
> played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones,
> you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the
> country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The
> Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits
> asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No
> cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people
> were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had
> always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew
> Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian
> language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual
> channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but
> not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly,
> everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just
> about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age
> appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from
> people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of
> American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom:
> dissent.
>
> Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately,
> overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper
> discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on
> the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage
> for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were
> reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar
> balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side
> comparisonÑRonald W. Reagan versus George W. BushÑand it's no surprise who
> suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political
> gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to
> Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free
> world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol
> rotunda, seemed to sum up the moodÑa portrait of my father and the words NOW
> THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.
>
> The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool,
> Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush
> administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various
> commissions and committeesÑPaul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how
> many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John
> Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as
> if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at himÑthese were a
> continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, tooÑa reminder of how certain
> environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People
> noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back
> on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide
> liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.
>
> Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their
> accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua
> franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration
> have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of
> convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they
> traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and,
> ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And
> people, finally, have started catching on.
>
> None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The
> far-right wing of the countryÑnearly one third of us by some
> estimatesÑcontinues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid
> (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush
> could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their
> vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to
> genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a
> crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a
> hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed
> by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the
> scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats,
> intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it
> becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe
> wackos.
>
> Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One
> that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people,
> but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so
> knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply
> cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty
> of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's
> not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at
> the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's
> critique of George W. Bush.
>
>
> THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirectionÑwhich the
> administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiateÑinvolve our
> putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq.
> During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble"
> foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I
> would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if we're
> an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation building." "Our
> military is meant to fight and win wars. . . And when it gets
> overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and consensus
> building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the
> larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as
> president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off
> adventuring in the Middle East.
>
> But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on
> September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge
> of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and
> have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland
> again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was
> complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the
> atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?
>
> Well, no.
>
> As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime "terror
> czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the
> enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
> Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. "From the
> start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could
> take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the
> same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt
> with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the
> Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrŽe. (Or who knows? The soup
> course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our
> representatives) that war was justified.
>
> The realÑbut elusiveÑprime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden,
> was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox NewsÑthe
> cable-TV outlet of the Bush White HouseÑtold me a year ago that mere mention
> of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded
> that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became
> International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had
> been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less
> than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the
> first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the
> north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and
> whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed
> or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a
> threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth.
>
> Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft,
> drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the
> nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National
> Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained,
> "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical
> weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We "know" Iraq
> possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We
> even "know" where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo,
> 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the
> World Trade Center.
>
>
> ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered,
> were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But
> contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war.
> Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam
> was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
>
> And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been justified
> in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the
> envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly
> mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of
> themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So
> were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White
> House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the
> first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us
> have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of
> women's panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing
> him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet
> plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or
> merely "sleep management"?
> Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the
> administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy.
> Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant
> bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants
> would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't "represent the best of
> what America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the proceedings of the
> 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual
> administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The
> appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including
> the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's
> primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for
> many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an
> entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question
> Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?
>
> The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and
> occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American
> public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and
> other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but
> were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but
> they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us
> because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There
> is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is
> sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got
> him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll
> be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place,
> only with rose petals and easy coochie.
>
> This Mšbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical
> "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the
> administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But
> the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you
> wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own
> imagining.
>
> And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same
> place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world
> twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and
> $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in
> his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various
> careers, has never had a job the way you have a jobÑwhere not showing up one
> morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it
> difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens
> who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration
> since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to
> worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his
> children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may
> be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks
> about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is
> filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In
> Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes.
> Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When
> the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking
> shrimp toast out of the carpet.
>
>
> ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their
> backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political
> suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were
> simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While
> the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the
> nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic.
> Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps
> embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term
> self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged
> rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit,
> perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
>
> Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during
> the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His
> untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally
> acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications
> typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was
> portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was
> a given. None of that "what the meaning of is is" business for him. And, God
> knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al
> Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained
> like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He
> would spend valuable weeks explaining away statementsÑ"I invented the
> Internet"Ñthat he never made in the first place. All this left the coast
> pretty clear for Bush.
>
> Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells
> two obviousÑif not exactly earth-shatteringÑlies and is not challenged.
> First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor
> of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure,
> only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law
> without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him
> during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These
> misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then
> quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and
> whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha
> male."
> Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his
> team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the
> White House, they picked up where they left off.
>
>
> IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was
> in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was
> whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been
> entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstancesÑfor all anyone knew at the
> time, Washington might still have been under attackÑthe appearance was,
> shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a
> threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief
> political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to
> that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such
> threat.
>
> Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham
> Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned
> MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush
> addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in
> IraqÑwhatever that may have beenÑwas far from accomplished. "Major combat
> operations," as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans
> were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the
> questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to
> "responsibility and accountability": It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a
> bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature
> triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.
>
> More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's dishonesty
> concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the
> country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza
> Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that "no one
> could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact,
> terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June
> 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning
> that "it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near
> future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in
> the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of
> hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times,
> after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack
> Inside United States," was delivered to the president at his ranch in
> Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most
> of the day fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as
> "historical" in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
>
> What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the
> telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to
> go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of
> security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the
> carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first
> hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that
> stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The
> banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a
> mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would
> have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and
> immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some
> respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's
> White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor
> gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth.
> But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as
> a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be
> fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As
> Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited"
> the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and
> vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush
> flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with
> the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because
> he doesn't bother to think.
>
>
> GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for
> office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the
> focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from
> the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a
> "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal
> evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and
> Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical
> Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also
> encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and
> assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of
> themÑ"partial birth" abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional
> amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to
> embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts
> about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their
> worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy.
> But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy,
> panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio,
> Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives,
> once told this magazine, "What you've got is everythingÑand I mean
> everythingÑbeing run by the political arm."
>
> This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim
> but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the
> other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public
> dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have
> voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to
> pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding
> global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really
> looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?
>
> If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead,
> Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a
> wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the
> horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up
> enough to carry him to another term.
>
>
> UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a
> personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One
> conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has already
> discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former
> president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will
> not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly
> know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfullyÑonce during my
> father's presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll acknowledge
> occasional annoyance at the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father,
> but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father,
> acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His
> Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with
> its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its
> kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't look
> in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I
> write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is
> plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current
> administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history,
> one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the
> wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly
> grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and
> ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his
> allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?
>
> Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot
> expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House.
> Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can
> restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper
> sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.
___________________________________
My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some have called "opinionated," is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. And my only hope is that, one day soon, women--who have all earned their right to their opinions--instead of being called opinionated, will be called smart and well-informed, just like men. ~Teresa Heinz Kerry (bless her)
posted on August 14, 2004 07:05:45 PM new
"Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker. I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT."
Ron Reagan
Thanks for posting that Roadsmith...I hope that Ron Reagan will continue to work for stem cell research. It was so inappropriate for the Bush administration to trot out Laura Bush to announce to all the people hoping for success in stem cell research that there was no hope.
posted on August 14, 2004 07:21:38 PM new
Laura said,
"I hope that stem cell research will yield cures," Laura Bush told the Pennsylvania Medical Society. "But I know that embryonic stem cell research is very preliminary right now and the implication that cures for Alzheimer's are around the corner is just not right and it's really not fair to people who are watching a loved one suffer with this disease."
A cure for Alzheimer's disease was not the primary goal of stem cell research. Other diseases likely to benefit from stem cell research include diabetes, Parkinson's, heart disease, cancer, and spinal cord injuries.
posted on August 14, 2004 09:16:23 PM new
You are welcome, folks. I'm glad you felt it worth posting.
___________________________________
My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some have called "opinionated," is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. And my only hope is that, one day soon, women--who have all earned their right to their opinions--instead of being called opinionated, will be called smart and well-informed, just like men. ~Teresa Heinz Kerry (bless her)
posted on August 16, 2004 02:05:24 PM new
Hijacking the Reagan Name
The 40th President Would Not Have Supported Cloning
By Nigel M. de S. Cameron
August 13, 2004
This article originally appeared in the Bioethics and Culture Network Newsletter.
To the credit of Ron Reagan, while he has hijacked his father's good name in the pursuit of unethical science, and done so with sophisticated dishonesty, he has finally let the cat out of the bag. Rather than waste his time and ours by asking for a few more stem-cell lines, or even a freezer full of "spare" embryos, he has gone to the heart of the issue. He's a cloner. What we need, he says, is mass-production cloning of human embryos. By the millions. Of course, he doesn't use the word "cloning." It's not a popular word, and his candor has its limits. So although it's a speech on cloning, he never uses the word, not even once. But he describes cloning, advocates cloning, and condemns those who oppose cloning.
Like other advocates of "therapeutic cloning" he hypes the hopes of the sick and their families and shamelessly exploits their anguish. To parade the courage and sadness of a 13 year old girl in a speech may not be as tasteless as having sick children testify at hearings (which I have also seen) but it has the effect of short-circuiting serious ethical and policy discussion and thereby offers a grave disservice to the cause of democracy. Our first gift to a brave, sick child and her family must be honesty. To suggest that cures for juvenile diabetes and Parkinson's disease are just around the corner, and that voting in pro-cloners will somehow make it happen, is a travesty. In fact, to date, only ethical research on adult stem cells has actually cured people with "incurable" diseases.
Consider the key paragraph of his speech to the Democratic Party's convention. If you've forgotten how they claim cloning might work, here's a refresher:
Now, imagine going to a doctor who, instead of prescribing drugs, takes a few skin cells from your arm. The nucleus of one of your cells is placed into a donor egg whose own nucleus has been removed. A bit of chemical or electrical stimulation will encourage your cell's nucleus to begin dividing, creating new cells which will then be placed into a tissue culture. . . . These stem cells are then driven to become the very neural cells that are defective in Parkinson's patients. And finally, those cells -- with your DNA -- are injected into your brain where they will replace the faulty cells whose failure to produce adequate dopamine led to the Parkinson's disease in the first place.
That's a good a summary of the cloning process, with typical "therapeutic cloning" hype-hope added. But wait a minute. What's missing? Only the fact that when "your cell" is placed in the egg what results is a human embryo, as much a human embryo as the embryo that results from natural conception or in vitro fertilization. This is the crucial missing step: an embryo is created, and that embryo is then destroyed - "disaggregated" is one technical term used - to harvest the stem cells.
Big Lie #1 in his cloning sales talk is that, "they are not, in and of themselves, human beings."
In fact cloning makes embryos, and extracting the embryo stem cells kills them.
To deny that the process Ron Reagan describes makes a "fetus" is of course as ridiculous as denying that it makes a three-year old child. Human fertilization and human cloning make human embryos, the tiny, genetically complete, members of our species that you and I once were. But side by side with his candid advocacy of this macabre, unethical science - in which your own embryonic twin is created and destroyed to cure your illness - he sets:
Big Lie #2 is that "their belief is just that, an article of faith, and they are entitled to it. But it does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the many.
A huge lie. A necessary lie. A lie that will have been unnoticed by almost all those at the Convention, and almost all those reading reports of what he said. It's a lie he may even believe himself.
It is untrue that mass-production embryo cloning is opposed only by pro-life Christians. His argument needs this lie, since it provides him the simplest way to dismiss his opponents. It is so convenient.
His meaning is unambiguous. He is asserting that the only opposition to cloning comes from pro-lifers who see it as "murder." Moreover, he says, they are driven by theological arguments. Yet as those of us who have been following this debate know well, there is opposition to cloning embryos for research purposes from just about every quarter of the culture; and they include the most vigorously pro-choice elements around.
For example, in a letter signed by around 100 pro-choice feminist leaders, a plea has been made for a moratorium on cloning embryos for research. Pro-choice feminists have taken this view for several reasons, one of them being the need for vast numbers of human eggs to be "donated" to make this experimental medicine work.
For example, the pro-choice United Methodist Church is on record as opposing cloning embryos.
For example, the radical environmental group Friends of the Earth is against it too.
For example - and this really is the clincher - in the past four months comprehensive bans on cloning, including for the exact purpose that Ron Reagan wants it, have been made law in both Canada and France. These now join other nations as diverse as Norway, Australia, and Germany, which had already added cloning for any purpose to their criminal code. And in Germany - where it carries a penalty of five years' imprisonment - they know a thing or two about unethical science.
Of course, the reason that Ron Reagan was able to get away with his "theology of a few" argument is that the American press has almost totally failed to report these facts: many feminists and environmentalists oppose research cloning, as do many pro-choice United Methodists, as do many nations around the world which are not run by pro-lifers.
Broad based opposition to cloning is not exactly a secret. Remember the two massive bipartisan votes in favor of a comprehensive cloning ban in the House of Representatives? Remember the floor speech by Bernie Sanders, the House's one Socialist member? Remember that the Senate bill that seeks a full cloning ban is co-sponsored by pro-choice Democrat Mary Landrieu? These are all matters of record, and they are being willfully ignored by journalists and politicians who are seeking to gerrymander public sentiment into this ghastly science.
So while we thank Ron Reagan for his candor in cutting to the chase and making the pitch for mass-production cloning that lies behind all the "embryo stem cell" discussions, he has brought our attention to the lies that dominate the American debate through a conspiracy of silence in the press - a conspiracy that gets less forgivable every day.
posted on August 17, 2004 12:47:23 AM new
Discrediting Ron Reagan on his stance concerning cloning in no way addresses some of the issues that are brought up in the Esquire article.
"Who's tending the bar? Sniping works up a thirst"
Sniping works up a thirst"