Bush administration flip flop: now destroying embryos isn’t murder

Bush spokesman Tony Snow told us that Bush believes embryonic stem cell research is murder before he told us that it isn’t. Today at the White House press briefing Snow backed off the “murder” word, retreating to “The President has said that he believes this is the destruction of human life.”

Hmmmm. So Bush vetoed a bill that would have allowed federal funding of embryonic stem cell research because this entails destroying human life. Yet it is OK if private funds destroy human life.

I’m with Steve Young on this one: murder is murder no matter who’s paying. Oh, except after the flip flop it isn’t murder. It’s “destruction of human life.” That apparently is fine, so long as a wink and a nod is given to the Christian fundamentalists whose support Karl Rove is counting on this November.

Ah, the smell of hypocrisy wafts over the Bush Administration’s rapidly decaying carcass.

Destruction of a microscopic embryo that will never become a human life is immoral, even if stem cell research could lead to cures for diseases that kill and afflict actual living people. However, pressing for an immediate cease fire in Lebanon is verboten, even if this would save the lives of many innocent civilians.

Apparently Bush’s reverence for life extends only to potential life that isn’t yet living. If you’re actually alive, fend for yourself, sucker.

The British daily “The Independent” makes you wish our newspapers truly were. A few days ago the paper told it like it is in “America’s domestic policy vs. America’s foreign policy.”

Yesterday US troops killed five people, including two women and a child, in the city of Baquba [Iraq] during a raid, claiming they had been shot at. At best it was a tragic error, at worst it spoke to the cavalier attitude of the US towards Iraqi civilian lives. Local police said that a man had fired from a rooftop at the Americans because he thought a hostile militia force was approaching.

While the eyes of the world are elsewhere, Baghdad is still dying and the daily toll is hitting record levels. While the plumes of fire and smoke over Lebanon have dominated headlines for 11 days, with Britain and the US opposing a UN call for an immediate ceasefire, another Bush-Blair foreign policy disaster is unfolding in Iraq.

Invoking the sanctity of human life, George Bush wielded the presidential veto for the first time in his presidency to halt US embryonic stem cell research in its tracks. He even paraded one-year-old Jack Jones, born from one of the frozen embryos that can now never be used for federally funded research, and talked of preventing the "taking of innocent human life". How hollow that sounds to Iraqis.

And to The Portland Freelancer. See “Thou shalt not kill unless George says it’s OK.”

There’s just 910 days and 6 hours of the Bush anti-life presidency left. The world will survive. I hope.

Comments

[carla]

I've been having this same argument with conservatives in an email debate group that I've belonged to for years.

This notion that its perfectly okay to "end human life" as long as its done with private funds is ridiculous and inane.

And in order to be consistent, the Bush Administration would have to end the federal death penalty.

"Hypocrisy" doesn't begin to scratch the surface.

[Kevin Hayden]

Bush is just another religionist who reads the Bible for the parts about sex and disregards the rest. Too many religionists shoulda stayed with the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.

[BarryO]

"And in order to be consistent, the Bush Administration would have to end the federal death penalty"

Also, to be consistant, they should call for the banning of in-vitro fertilization. After all, that is what creates all these nascent "human lives", and leads ultimately to the "killing" of the vast majority of them.