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Frank - I believe Kerry cut his own throat when he brought up VP's
daughter being a lesbian.  How thoughtless.  I am
heterosexual, and I don't care what people do in bed.  All I care about
is what they do in public and around me.   What an uproar from that one
statement.  Jo Ann

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 06:16:32 -0400 FrankandTeri <[log in to unmask]>
writes:
> "Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately,
> for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically
> afflicted is despicable."
>
> Washington Post Article, by Charles Krauthammer
>
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34167-2004Oct14.html>
>
>  After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the
> word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for
> everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no
> parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry
> campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is
> the plan? Vote for Kerry.
>
> This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do
> the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do
> when
> John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to
> walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
>
> In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome
> display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad.
> Deliberately,
> for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically
> afflicted is despicable.
>
> Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
>
> First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one
> of
> the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around
> the
> corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards
> did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is
> scandalous.
>
> Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea
> where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell
> research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative
> one
> at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for
> paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The
> last
> fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing.
> Nothing
> came of it.
>
> As a doctor by training, I've known better than to believe the hype
> --
> and have tried in my own counseling of people with new spinal cord
> injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise
> instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life it can
> be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this advice
> have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the
> corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of
> them.
>
> Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from
> getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a
> travesty.
>
> George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for
> stem
> cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up
> from
> one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's
> Council
> on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells
> waiting for anybody who wants them.
>
> Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell
> research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem
> cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply
> to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.
>
> In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry referred not once
> but
> four times to the "ban" on stem cell research instituted by Bush. At
> the time, Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous
> exploitation. But Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died
> of
> Alzheimer's.
>
> So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the
> disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is standing in the way of
> an Alzheimer's cure.
>
> This is an outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on
> which I sit, had one of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's,
> Dennis Selkoe from Harvard, give us a lecture on the newest and most
> promising approaches to solving the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe
> reported remarkable progress in using biochemicals to clear the
> "plaque" deposits in the brain that lead to Alzheimer's. He ended
> his
> presentation without the phrase "stem cells" having passed his lips.
>
> So much for the miracle cure. Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell
> researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly that stem cells as an
> Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need a fairy tale."
> Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly exploiting this
> fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters that stem
> cells play well politically for them.
>
> Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of
> the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy
> price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of
> desperate
> people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
>
> There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing.
> There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.
>
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