Caesar and Stem Cells

The religious right’s position on embryonic stem cell research is clear: consign Alzheimer's and Parkinson's sufferers to death on the off chance that a blastocyst will crawl out of the garbage pail to work the breakfast shift at Burger King.

But can anyone remember the President’s tortured decree of August 2001? Billed by the White House as the most intense display of soul searching this side of Thomas More taking a position on remarriage.

At the time, many in the media saw a principled leader sharing a knowledgeable vision tempered with the wisdom of moral reflection. Others saw the performance for what it was: Jethro Bodine doing his bioethical “gazintas”. “Cipherin” the cell lines to fit the base-placating compromise Karl Rove had floated months before....and his “gazintas” were wrong.

Yet it’s not nearly as troubling that W. refrained from asking the National Institute Of Health how many of the available 64 stem cell lines had been nourished with radiated mouse cells, potentially capable of causing plague in humans, as it is that he believed there were 64 usable lines in the first place because “the NIH looked me in the eye”. As even a casual follower of W.’s soul-sensing experience with Vladimir Putin knows; his beady, rodentesque peepers emit the most penetrating gaze since Bela Lugosi portrayed a voodoo-wielding slave master of the undead in ‘White Zombie’.

Now pro-pre life flaks roam the land, insisting that “taxpayer dollars" not be spent on “false hope” but on missile shields and drug wars -- while the President interprets back to back electoral majorities from the Supreme Court and Diebold as a mandate to define science and reason. If he can cycle along unconcerned as Rummy prepares to blast a Cessna from the sky, he will certainly not devote a nanosecond of reflection to a made decision.

Yes, on stem cells, as on many issues, the President is finished thinking. But if he wants to stage cloying photo ops to yammer how “every human life is a precious gift of matchless love”; maybe he’ll hold the next one in a Fallujah soccer field...the kids under there have as much chance for life as those thousands of clumps of frozen cells.