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Jim,
A very good article. These guys are selling
inuendo, and a promise to do a 'better' job than the current
administration. Absent of any details on any of the promises (even if one
is inclined to put their faith in the snake oil sales), one must rely on
their past to give some indication of their ability to be honest and
trustworthy.
I offer the following - everyone should be
informed as possible.
Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what
you can do!
Billy
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 3:14
PM
Subject: [QUAD-L] FW: A
washingtonpost.com article
An Edwards Outrage
By
Charles Krauthammer
After the second presidential
debate, in which John Kerry used the
word "plan" 24 times, I said on
television that Kerry has a plan for
everything except curing psoriasis. I
should have known there is no
parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out
days later that the Kerry
campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to
cure paralysis. What is the
plan? Vote for Kerry.
This
is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do
the work
that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when
John Kerry is
president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to
walk, get up out of
that wheelchair and walk again."
In my 25 years in
Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome
display of demagoguery. Hope
is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately,
for personal gain, raising false
hope in the catastrophically afflicted
is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First,
the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of
the great
mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the
corner. It
could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did,
that it is
imminent if only you elect the right politicians
is
scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord
injury comes, we have no idea
where it will come from. There are many lines
of inquiry. Stem cell
research is just one of many possibilities, and a
very speculative one
at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle
cures for
paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The
last
fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing.
Nothing
came of it.
As a doctor by training, I've known
better than to believe the hype --
and have tried in my own counseling
of people with new spinal cord
injuries to place the possibility of
cure in abeyance. I advise instead
to concentrate on making a life (and a
very good life it can be) with
the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies
of this advice have been the
snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around
the corner. I never
expected a candidate for vice president to be one of
them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was
prevented from
getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies
is a
travesty.
George Bush is the first president to
approve federal funding for stem
cell research. There are 22 lines of stem
cells now available, up from
one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of
the President's Council on
Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500
shipments of stem cells waiting
for anybody who wants
them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on
stem cell
research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem
cells?
You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to
the
National Institutes of Health for the federal
funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry
referred not once but
four times to the "ban" on stem cell research
instituted by Bush. At the
time, Reeve was alive, so not available for
posthumous exploitation. But
Ronald Reagan was available, having recently
died of Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his
radio address with the
disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is
standing in the way of an
Alzheimer's cure.
This is an
outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on
which I sit, had one
of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's,
Dennis Selkoe from Harvard,
give us a lecture on the newest and most
promising approaches to solving
the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe reported
remarkable progress in using
biochemicals to clear the "plaque" deposits
in the brain that lead to
Alzheimer's. He ended his presentation without
the phrase "stem cells"
having passed his lips.
So much for the miracle cure.
Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell
researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly
that stem cells as an
Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need
a fairy tale."
Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly
exploiting this
fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters
that stem cells
play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of
the
game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy
price
controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate
people
with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the
pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is
too revealing.
There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get
elected.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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