Finally, someone gets it

You see, if you really want to honor a fallen President, you don't just go on CNN and wax poetically about his unbelievable greatness. You do something else:

Senators seek looser stem cell rules

June 7, 2004  |  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fifty-eight senators are asking President Bush to relax federal restrictions on stem cell research, and several said Monday that the late President Reagan's Alzheimer's disease underscored a need to expand the research using human embryos.

The senators' letter to Bush was sent Friday, before Reagan died after a long struggle with Alzheimer's.


In case you're wondering, John Kerry did sign the letter. So did both of California's senators, and Hillary, and also Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, and Lamar Alexander. In all, 42 Democrats, Jim Jeffords (the Senate's lone Independent), and 15 Republicans. I wonder, if you plotted the relationship between non-signees to that letter, and appearances on Reagan tribute shows, what would you get? Don't answer, I think we all know.

Anyone in this country who dares to deny the furthering of stem cell research on whatever grounds and in the same breath praise Reagan as a great American should be ashamed of themselves. This, in the end, is the biggest problem of the conservative "revolution": its utter hypocrisy. Nancy herself has come around on this issue, fund-raising for stem cell research as recently as last month.

By the way, one of those hypocrites is our current President, currently preparing to deliver a eulogy for a dead man whose suffering could have been avoided:

White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said Bush stood by his stem cell policy.

"The president remains committed to exploring the promise of stem cell research but at the same time continues to believe strongly that we should not cross a fundamental moral line by funding or encouraging the destruction of human embryos," Lisaius said.

"The president does not believe that life should be created for the sole purpose of destroying it. He does believe we can explore the promise and potential of stem cell research using the existing lines of stem cells."

Just as Reagan failed in his health policy to disastrous results, mainly because of allegience to his Christian base, so is Our Chimp, blinded by meaningless "sanctity of life" rhetoric from genuinely helping the sick.

By the way, you all know that upon leaving office, Reagan claimed that his one regret was not overturning Roe v. Wade. And then there's this stunner of a story from Z Mag:

The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.