Quote:
Tyrone Slothrop
Michael Kinsley wrote a new piece on the stem-cell issue in yesterday's paper, and through the miracle of information technology I bring it to you. Dunno about anyone else, but I would pay to see a Kinsley/Laura Bush iron-cage match.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
