Is Bush’s Stem Cell Policy Vindicated?

Recently, scientists discovered a method of coaxing ordinary skin cells into becoming stem cells, thus avoiding the ethical quandary of having to harvest stem cells from embryos. Conservative commentators have seized on the apparent breakthrough to argue Bush’s stem cell policy – which denied federal funding for stem cell research derived from human embryos – has been vindicated. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer hyperventilates that "the embryonic stem cell debate is over. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president -- so vilified for a moral stance -- been so thoroughly vindicated."

Not so fast. Conservative pundits have been taking a licking on issues like global warming, Iraq, and Bush’s counter terrorism strategy so it’s little wonder that they’d like to turn the tables for once and insist the "debate is over." A closer look at the issue, however, reveals that Bush’s stem cell stance yielded few, if any, genuine moral benefits. Indeed, the supposed "moral clarity" Bush exercised in delineating the bright red line around "human embryos" had far more to do with abortion politics than any ethically or scientifically defensible principle. To put it simply, Bush’s policy did not save lives or uphold the sanctity of life. But curtailing federal funding for stem cell lines created from human embryos will have an ongoing pernicious effect in so far as federal dollars and ethical oversight go hand in hand. Let me explain.

At the crux of the matter is the question: is a human embryo a person? The term "human embryo" is at least somewhat loaded in so far as it implies that an embryo meets the criteria to count as an individual. It does not, for this reason: as late as two weeks after conception a single embryo can spontaneously split in two and begin developing as twins. Simply put, individuality, personhood, and the soul are not concepts that can be appropriately applied at an embryo’s earliest stages. This point is reinforced by the fact that as many as 75% of fertilized embryos spontaneously abort before implanting. Nature is simply wasteful and indifferent in the extreme.

Right-to-life advocates, however, are wedded to the doctrine that life begins at conception. This view is often attended by wooly metaphysical dogma about the infusion of soul and body taking place at conception. This view, of course, is difficult to square with the facts cited above (the vast majority of embryos spontaneously abort and a single embryo can spontaneously become twins two weeks after conception).

It doesn’t follow from this, however, that the moral value of an embryo is nil. Given the right circumstances an embryo has the potential to become a human being. Thus, when we speak of a "human embryo" we should remember that we are using that designation primarily to refer to the genetic material as being distinct from that of other species, but we are not referring to a distinct individual that has the moral status of a human person. If we were, then it would be wrong to create surplus embryos to help infertile couples have children. But even most on the religious right aren’t too keen on creating a fuss over surplus embryos created as a byproduct of helping infertile couples have children.

Nevertheless, conservative pundits use the term "human embryo" as a rhetorical sleight of hand, subtly implying each and every embryo is a unique human being. But deep down, most serious people don’t believe this because, or there would be calls to ban in vitro fertilization and outlaw privately funded embryonic stem cell research. As it stands, Bush’s policy does not prohibit embryonic stem cell research that is privately funded. Since federal funding invariably entails greater ethical oversight, however, Bush’s policy actually creates the worst of all possible worlds; less dollars where they are needed and less oversight where it is needed.

The discovery that scientists can coax ordinary skin cells into becoming stem cells is a remarkable breakthrough. The ability to bypass even a perceived ethical quandary is welcome, but it would be mistaken and way premature to insist that this new procedure vindicates Bush’s decision, it does not. Bush’s decision, and the reasoning behind it, deserve respect as a serious effort to grapple with profound and difficult questions. The approach of countries like Great Britain, however, has been even more high-minded and serious because the debate there has not been distorted by abortion politics. Those crowing about Bush stem cell policy being vindicated should be a little way of declaring "mission accomplished."

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Bush Authorizes Secret Program to Torture Language

President Bush has signed a super-secret executive order that authorizes him, in his role as commander-in-chief, to torture the any member of the Axis-of-Information (language, reason, or truth) without court approval. Previously, according to long-standing American tradition, any president who wanted to stretch language to the breaking point, douse the truth, or shock reason had to go before a special magistrate in order obtain a writ of verbias corpus.

Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that beneath the White House bunker is a secret chamber where men in black hoods use sharp instruments to chop words, dissect logic, and mince meaning. As one former linguistic inquisitor put it: “We have the tools to make language talk. We may have to get a little rough, but we’ll get those damn words to open up. When we’re through with them, they’ll tell us everything we want to hear.”

The Department of Informational Conformity and Kompliance (DICK), which was set up during the last days of the Nixon Administration by a zealous up-and-comer, remains one of the most secretive and sensitive institutions in the bowels of the government. Most officials refuse to confirm or deny its existence, but lawyers for Abdul Hominem, a French national of Arab descent, who was recently held incommunicado in DICK’s chambers for two years, and released only after successfully complying with the Bush Administration’s “Don’t talk, don’t torture*” program, has come forward to expose horrific examples linguistic abuse.

“They’re bending logic like a pretzel, meaning has been turned inside out, and they’ve had common sense tied up without a let up for more than six years. They picked me [A. Hominem] up around election time and flailed me until I was of no use to them anymore. I was putty in their hands. But you should have seen what they did with a couple of guys nicknamed Bait & Switch. They roughed them up so bad they switched sides and are now working for the administration. Talk about flip-floppers. One thing I know for sure, they [the administration] are not interested in the truth.”

President Bush has pointedly maintained that the United States adheres strictly to the Semantics Convention. But after signing Merriam-Webster, legislation that specifically bans tortured syntax, the president issued a signing statement, then winked, and said, “A word means just what the commander-in-chief says it means. Nothing more. Nothing less.” The so-called Humpty Dumpty clause, as critics are calling it, would allow Bush to continue mangling the English language with impunity. As noted linguist and language rights activist Nim Chimpsky puts it, “the Bush Administration War on Language metaphor has led to us an axis-of-clichés – tautologies, non-sequitars, and fallacies – whereby language itself is used to strangle thought.”

President Bush, however, steadfastly insists that he will leave “no slogan behind” on the battlefield of ideas. “Some say the War on Words is just a metaphor. They believe that if we cut and run the axis-of-evil – the grammarians, copy-editors, and smart-alecky satirists -- would leave us plain-speaking, hackneyed, cliché loving Americas alone. They would not; they would follow us home, both literally and figuratively. Which is why I made the decision to fight language abroad, in the realm of thought, rather than here at home, the land of truisms and platitudes. We shall fight to the last cliché.”

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Bush vs. Scott McClellan

It is one of life’s ironies that the so-called “value voters” – the evangelicals and Christian conservatives from the religious right -- were instrumental in installing a president (George W. Bush) who tortures the truth at every opportunity. That Bush is a prevaricator par excellence is not even disputable. His misrule has been predicated on lies, spin, and the subversion of the reality-based community. For instance, the Bush administration spun fabricated evidence to sell the Iraq War, while whitewashing scientific evidence that contradicted their stance on global warming. The end result is an ideological bubble that has burst in the public’s face. One victim of Bush’s mendacity is poor little Scott McClellan, the president’s hapless former press secretary who was asked to disseminate falsehoods on his boss’s behalf. As McClellan explains:

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

McClellan, of course, is referring to his role in vouching for the veracity of Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, effectively telling the public – falsely – that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with leaking the name of Valerie Plame Wilson after her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times debunking a central argument in the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq – namely that Saddam was allegedly trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

The ferociousness of the administration’s counterattack is startling even by the standards of Bush/Cheney. But there were good reason why the vice-president’s office, in particular, was so intent on attacking Wilson in a way that would send a message to other potential critics and whistleblowers. As Crain Unger reports in his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to suggest that some key neoconservative figures may have been involved in a 1999 burglary at the Nigerian embassy in Italy.

The break-in, as it happens, was the source of the forged documents that Bush later cited in his infamous State of the Union Address (the sixteen words about Saddam allegedly trying to acquire uranium from Africa). However, by the time of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, the intelligence community (and much of the administration) recognized that the documents in question were dubious, yet the words were actually re-inserted in the president’s speech!

Was Bush in the dark while Cheney pulled the strings? Did the neoconservatives in the VP’s office fear Congressional, media, or public scrutiny might reveal that key neocon figures might be connected to the forged documents. It is clear that Libby’s lies regarding the Plame leak were not just much ado about nothing; they were a smokescreen intended to protect higher ups and perhaps a conspiracy that brought the country to war by deliberately providing Congress and the American people with false intelligence. Instead of getting to the bottom of the leak, as Bush promised, he had his press secretary lie to the American people and then he commuted the sentence of a convicted perjurer. Well, I guess the Libby case proves that telling the truth isn’t always necessary to set you free.

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Is Bush's Surge Vindicated?

Recently, Bush’s supporters have been chirping that the president’s troop surge into Baghdad has been vindicated because violence in Iraq is in a downward trend. The prospect of a full-scale civil war seems to have abated, and there are encouraging signs that al-Qaeda in Iraq is in retreat. These are welcome tactical developments, but using words like “success” or “victory” would be wholly inappropriate in the context of a war that has otherwise been a strategic and moral calamity for the United States.

For the religious right, however, the campaign in Iraq is not just the central front in the war on terror, but also the central front in a cultural and political crusade to wrest control of the national narrative from the secular left. In other words, the religious right desperately wants to claim some sort of victory in Iraq so that they can declare that God and the tide of history are on their side. When things looked hopeless in Iraq the right insisted that it would be some decades before Bush is vindicated. But when a few encouraging developments materialize the right immediately claims vindication and insists that opponents of the war are in denial.

In reality, the war in Iraq has greatly complicated and compounded the challenges the United States faces. Future historians are more likely to say the Iraq War was “Mission impossible” than they are to say the mission was accomplished, but there are too many variables to know how Iraq will manage to turn out in the end. It is quite possible -- indeed I think it is likely -- that Iraq will be quite better off some decades from now than it would have been under Saddam’s Baath Party rule. However, the benefits of Iraq turning out all right may prove more negligible and irrelevant to America’s interests than the architects of the war ever imagined.

The Iraq War must be understood in a context that includes: the rise of China and India, the twilight of the hydrocarbon era, the challenge of militant Islam, and global warming. The invasion of Iraq has done little to alleviate these challenges; indeed, the botched occupation has drained America’s resources away from these and other pressing issues. It is impossible to tie a single hurricane, wildfire, or similar ecological catastrophe to climate change. But if the United States continues to suffer record economic and environmental devastation predicted by scientific authorities, then even a successful outcome in Iraq will look like an imprudent use of American resources.

The strategic rationale for invading Iraq included the idea of exerting hegemony over the region’s petroleum resources in order that the United States would benefit from China’s voracious appetite for oil. To put it bluntly, the Bush administration wanted to insure that: U.S. and British oil firms benefited from China’s phenomenal economic growth and that oil purchases would be denominated in dollars (which confers enormous benefits to U.S. financial firms). To date, however, the price of oil has risen to $100 a barrel (a five-fold increase since the Bush administration took office) while the dollar is sinking to new lows. In short, invading Iraq has precipitated the exact opposite of the Bush administration’s strategic aims, not just on the economic and energy fronts, but also in so far as it has boosted the jihadist cause worldwide.

The Bush administration is going to have to expend a lot of energy just to undo the damage its ill-considered and ill-executed invasion has wrought. To this end, Condoleezza Rice has organized a Middle Eastern Peace conference to try and contain Iran and ameliorate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An administration that at one time believed to road to peace in the Middle East went through Baghdad, Tehran, and Syria (i.e., regime change) has now flip-flopped in so far as it is embracing diplomacy in a last ditch effort to salvage Bush’s legacy.

The prospects for a positive outcome in Iraq have increased marginally in recent months, but they are still dim. Simply put, the Bush administration’s legacy is at the mercy of external events and the next administration. Unless some cataclysmic event dramatically changes public opinion, neither the next administration nor the American people are likely to be inclined to sustain Bush’s nation building efforts in Iraq. All the parties jockeying for power in Iraq recognize this and they are laying low. As one observer put it, the current lull in violence we are seeing now will be revealed as a great deception.

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Top Ten Policy Achievements of the Bush Administration

10). A lower dollars makes it more likely a foreign buyer can purchase my house before the bank forecloses.

9). Higher prices at the pump means we can afford to spend less on foreign aid that helps oil-producing third world countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

8). Global warming has really increased the potency of my medical marijuana crop.

7). Getting Muslims to fight each other over there in Iraq so they wouldn’t fight us over here is an idea that should have earned the axis-of-clichés, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the Noble Peace Prize.

6). No Money Down, No Interest. No Payments till January, 2009 sure was an affordable way to buy into a war.

5). Hey, who would have thought that George W. Bush could have done so much to rehabilitate the reputations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

4). “Spending the government surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy helped insure we didn’t waste the money on deficit reduction, saving Social Security, or providing health insurance for needy brats. Bah Humbug.” -- Ebenezer Scrooge

3). George Bush has done for politics in America what Vince McMahon did for professional wrestling. Ok, neither is really edifying, but they sure are entertaining.

2). Dirt bike trails used by Bush and his Secret Service entourage are sure to be designated national landmarks by Bush’s successor.

1). Bush’s bridge to nowhere is leading back to anther Clinton White House.

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Bush, God, and the Collapse of the Religious Right

Herman Melville once wrote that a sharing a bed with a sober cannibal was preferable to bedding down with a drunken Christian. After seven years of the Bush administration, the intoxication Evangelicals felt at having one of their own in the White House is giving way to a pretty nasty hangover. To put it mildly, there aren’t many on the religious right anymore who think George W. Bush has been the answer to their prayers.

How could the Bush administration – now recognized by most thinking persons as one of the worst ever – go so wrong when Bush and his followers so earnestly prayed to God for guidance? To paraphrase Nikos Kazantzakis, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man; one shouldn’t expect to get an answer.

The notion of a personal creator God, one that answers prayers and intervenes in history, is not an idea that attracts serious attention among the scientific and philosophically literate. Indeed, many leading thinkers privately believe that religious belief may be a form of mental illness. Certainly, watching the Bush administration self-destruct at it succumbed to its delusions it is pretty hard not to conclude that rationality and religion are incompatible.

Many of the people who helped put Bush into power truly are loony; they believe in preposterous things like the speaking in tongues, Biblical inerrancy, the Rapture, and Armageddon. They also believed that electing a Godly man such as Bush would mean having God’s instrument in the Oval Office. Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib and a thousand other failures of leadership have sorely tested that conviction.

There is nothing more painful than false belief, which is why so many evangelicals are in a state of disillusionment regarding their ill-fated fusion of politics and faith. Surely, the irony is so glaring even fundamentalists can see it: the morally suspect William Jefferson Clinton (the anti-Christ to some on the religious right) is widely regarded as both a successful and popular leader, while George W. Bush is widely recognized and reviled as a disaster.

One of the most salient examples of religious zealotry and foolishness going hand in hand can be seen in the case of Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State who flagrantly used the powers of her office to delay and impede an impartial recount during the disputed 2000 election, effectively undermining the will of the electorate, both in the crucial state of Florida and the United States as a whole.

The flakey Harris, who went on to an undistinguished career in Congress (to put it charitably,) later articulated her belief that America’s leaders needed to be Christians in order to take the government back from the secularists. “If you’re not electing Christians,” she maintained, “then in essence you are going to legislate sin.”

It’s hard to square Harris’ sentiment with water boarding, the sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib, and countless other acts of corruption and lawlessness perpetrated by the Bush administration. But Melville would recognize the perils associated with self-righteous certainty and religious zealotry. After all, his monomaniacal Captain Ahab was convinced he was acting as “Fate’s Lieutenant” as he pursued the incarnation of evil, Moby Dick, “round perdition’s fires.”

Ironically, however, Ahab merely became an agent of the malicious evil he sought to extinguish in his quest to vanquish the great white whale. Tragically, of course, Ahab succeeded only in creating more orphans. There’s a lesson in there for George Bush and his crew; lash out at bogeymen and all too often you come to embody the characteristics you fear and loath.

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Top Ten Reasons to Vote for Dennis Kucinich for President

10) Congressman Kucinich is the only presidential candidate with a comprehensive plan to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq in less than two weeks by using a secret fleet of UFOs based at Roswell.

9) Kucinich’s plan to use his friend Shirley MacLaine to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects telepathically is sure to result in better intelligence than the Bush administration ever got.

8) With the pint-sized Kucinich, we’ll finally have a politician who sides with the little guy.

7) Kucinich’s pledge to name Mr. Spock as his running mate is just what our solar system needs after having Darth Vader reining as VP for eight years.

6) Kucinich’s comprehensive immigration plan will allow extra-terrestrials to apply for a driver’s license, even if they only live on our planet part time.

5) After eight years of Bush as a wartime president it’s about time we had a space cadet as commander-in-chief.

4) Kucinich’s proposal to rename the Defense Department the Peace Department is an idea that’s light years ahead of its time. And so is his idea to rename Air Force One the Starship Enterprise.

3) Kucinich’s plan to reorganize the U.S. Military into a new Starfleet Academy is sure to boost enlistment.

2) It’s about time we had a president who’ll think more about colonizing outer space than the Middle East.

1) Kucinich really is the candidate with the best ideas and values to be president (Unfortunately, the joke here is on Americans who’ll probably end up voting for a candidate as synthetic and artificial as a loaf of Wonder Bread – i.e., Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton – rather than an authentic human being).

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The State of Emergency in Pakistan

“The world is safer without Saddam Hussein” is one of those statements that sounds meaningful, but is actually vacuous nonsense. Is it safer for most Iraqis? Is the threat of global warming accelerating? Are Islamic radicals closer to getting their hands on WMD, perhaps by overturning Pakistan’s shaky government? There are hundreds of question like these one can ask, but most of the answers are unknowable. There are too many “known unknowns,” as the snow flakey former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say.

One thing we do know, however, is that Pakistan -- a pillar of the Bush administration counterterrorism strategy – is crumbling. The recent assassination attempt against Benazir Bhutto, and a state of emergency called by President Musharaff, are indicative of the kind of chaos the country is in. The administration may claim Iraq is making progress, and that this will be a huge setback for the terrorists. But while Iraq has garnered the headlines, Pakistan has arguably become the true front on the war on terror (and to say that we’ve been losing ground in Pakistan would be an understatement).

In a nutshell, the problem with the Bush administration’s approach to Pakistan is that they’ve put all their eggs in Musharaff’s basket. This follows from Bush’s “great man” theory of leadership, the notion that a single individual can turn the tide of history. No doubt, Bush sees himself as a decisive actor, the kind of leader who through force of character and willpower shapes the world’s destiny for the better. It remains to be seen, of course, what verdict History will render regarding Bush: deluded fool or visionary statesman?

It is becoming clear however, that Bush’s destiny increasingly depends on Musharaff’s. The Pakistani general has declared martial law, he is moving to silence journalists and opposition leaders, and he has quarantined the country’s Supreme Court until they ratify his power grab. Whether this will help stabilize or further radicalize Pakistan remains to be seen. It is a test of Bush’s theory of leadership: namely, that great statesmen are a law unto themselves. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal hangs in the balance. Are you feeling safer?

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Bush vs. God

It increasingly looks like evangelicals won’t have a prayer in the 2008 presidential election. The so-called values voters are in a state of disillusionment with George W. Bush, who seems to have fractured nearly everything he’s touched (most notably Iraq, the Republican Party, and the long-hoped for Conservative realignment). Indeed, George Bush’s Road to Nowhere appears to be leading back to the candidate many on the religious-right view as the anti-Christ: namely Hillary Clinton. How could it all go so wrong for the Right?

When you mix religion with politics you get the worst of both worlds. Politics is about compromise, half-measures, give and take, meeting halfway, and cutting practical deals in order to achieve outcomes most of us can accept as we try to make our way in an imperfect world. Religion is about bedrock principles, eternal truths, God’s commandments, and ordering our human affairs to accord with Natural Law. The politician thinks in terms of provisional and incremental progress, while the religious leader frequently surveys the social world and sees social and moral decline.

Abortion, evolution, and secularization are bogeymen as far as leaders on the religious right are concerned. Many of them earnestly believe God will punish the United States if it does not reverse its evil ways, which include a decadent culture, a depraved indifference to fetal life, and an indifference to God in the public arena. I happen to believe that the notion of God punishing the U.S. because Roe vs. Wade is the law of the land is irrational, but that in no way dismisses their legitimate concerns that a widespread and cavalier attitude towards abortion is injurious to the social fabric.

Ironically, many countries that have permissive abortions laws have far lower rates of abortions than countries with Draconian bans on the procedure. The perfect, it seems, is the enemy of the good (a cliché that could well summarize the Bush administration’s tragic errors when it comes to its efforts to export democracy to Iraq).

Evangelicals and the so-called values voters are undergoing a period of heartfelt reflection and reappraisal regarding the infusion of religion and politics. How could a president they prayed so fervently for end up leading America into an abyss of abuse and torture characterized by Abu Ghraib, water boarding, and extraordinary renditions? How could a man of faith, like Bush, make so many fundamental misjudgments? Wasn’t God guiding him?

There’s an Oriental saying that the gods only laugh at those who pray for money. But perhaps prayers directed at political ends elicit heavenly chuckles too. Certainly Bush’s reign has been as much farce as tragedy. Evangelical leaders, incidentally, are distancing themselves from the failures of the Bush administration, a move that more or less excuses the fact that they supported Bush in droves. It seems an agnostic liberal like me – I’ve been sounding the warning bell against Bush ever since the political gods overturned the will of the American people with their indefensible and constitutionally dubious decision in Bush vs. Gore – recognized just how pernicious G.W.B would be for America’s values long before the righteous right did. Now isn’t that a Divine irony? For more on the subject check out this article in The New York Times Magazine.

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