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Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Ramesh Ponnuru responds
Kinsley writes that it's "embarrassingly silly and disingenuous" for Mrs. Bush to brag that her husband is the first president to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The research is new, notes Kinsley, and it's just as true that Bush is the first president "to authorize federal rules against stem cell research." Kinsley is wrong about that. President Clinton signed into law a restriction on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research that was arguably tighter than what Bush has done. He tried to interpret the law away, and Bush's policy is more restrictive than what Clinton wanted to do--but it's looser than what Clinton actually did.
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I have no idea who is right on this point, and have nothing to add. Ponnoru should have stopped here, because it gets much worse . . . .
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Kinsley argues that it's inconsistent for Mrs. Bush to brag that privately-financed embryo research is going on. "The purpose of Bush's stem cell policy is to discourage medical research using embryos." If the Bushes believe that human embryos are human beings, then they shouldn't be bragging about how the private sector is killing them unimpeded. It's a cute argument, but it doesn't quite work. "Discouraging research using human embryos" is one possible purpose of the administration's policy, although not one that the president has to my knowledge declared to be his purpose. If it were his purpose, he could reasonably point out the lack of restrictions on private-sector research as evidence of the moderation of his policy. But in any case, "not putting the imprimatur of the federal government on this research" and "not forcing taxpayers who strongly oppose this research to pay for it" are also purposes that Bush's policy serves, and those purposes are not at all inconsistent with Mrs. Bush's remarks.
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Bullshit. As club has pointed out, Bush thinks that embryos are human and should not be experimented on. If you think this, you shouldn't be bragging about private research -- you should be talking about criminalizing it.
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Kinsley lays into Mrs. Bush for talking about how promoters of expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research are falsely raising people's hopes. He does not even bother to address the evidence, by now widely known, that that is exactly what is going on with respect, for example, to Alzheimer's disease.
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If you can't attack him for what he does say, best to attack him for failing to point something else out. Although Kinsley did note that Parkinson's is one of the most promising areas, implicitly acknowledging that other diseases offer less hope.
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Kinsley, in passing, says that human embryos have fewer human characteristics than a potato. Really? Presumably they have some important human characteristics--we're not having a huge controversy over stem cells taken from sheep embryos.
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Kinsley didn't say that embryos aren't human at all. And they are so different from the rest of us that any similarity could not even have been detected until recent years.
