Physician-Assisted Political Suicide

Where in blazes did this come from?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist endorsed government-funded research on human embryonic stem cells Friday, breaking with President Bush and the religious conservatives he's been courting for a 2008 presidential bid.

Here's the money portion of Fristy's embryo-destruction-research-embracing floor speech this morning:

I am pro-life. I believe human life begins at conception. It is at this moment that the organism is complete - yes, immature - but complete. An embryo is nascent human life. It’s genetically distinct. And it’s biologically human. It’s living. This position is consistent with my faith.

Sounds like a liberal radio seminar caller - "I worked for Goldwater and I sold a kidney to contribute to Reagan and I've named all my kids 'George Walker' (even the girls).

His misleading preamble wasn't done, BTW:

Our development is a continuous process - gradual and chronological. We were all once embryos. The embryo is human life at its earliest stage of development. And accordingly, the human embryo has moral significance and moral worth. It deserves to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect.

Buuuuuut....

I also believe that embryonic stem cell research should be encouraged and supported.

Eh? Frist is pro-life, pro-embryo, but he favors destroying them for medical research anyway? And this is "utmostly dignified and respectful" how, exactly?

But, just as I said in 2001, it should advance in a manner that affords all human life dignity and respect - the same dignity and respect we bring to the table as we work with children and adults to advance the frontiers of medicine and health.

No wonder Ramesh Ponnuru calls this speech "a logical train wreck." Just about every place except in the U.S. Capitol, it seems, veneration for human life and embryo destruction are understood to be fundamentally irreconcilable, mutually exclusive concepts. It's like claiming to stand for teen sexual abstinence and then declaring that teens should screw in a manner that affords chastity "dignity and respect." It's like claiming to be a tax-cutter and then declaring that taxes should go up in a manner that affords taxpayer wallets "dignity and respect." It's like claiming to be a pacifist and then declaring that we should nuke Muslim Holy sites in a "dignified, respectful, and peaceful way."

It is, in a word, gobbledygook. Know how you can tell? Harry Reid called Frist "courageous," "Snarlin' Arlen" Specter called Frist's speech "the most important...this year," and Dick Durbin - DICK F'ING DURBIN - was singing Frist's praises.

Why did he pull this el foldo? Beats me. But Ponnuru has a few suggestions:

As for the politics of Frist's move, I can see how he would think it a good idea. The polls favor it, his friends in biomedicine favor it too, and he may have thought that he had running room given that McCain, Allen, Romney, and (one assumes) Giuliani favor it too.

Of course, in a crowded field with no clear front-runner, don't you want to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack? Particularly when the rest of the pack is elbowing each other for an issue stance that is at fundamental variance with that of your party's nominating electorate?

Kate O'Beirne seems to think so - and she thinks that is but the beginning of his problems:

He might figure he's not running against George Bush in 2008 and so only has to be as pro-life as his expected competition, but he has a liability most of them don't.

Unlike George Allen or Mitt Romney who have been governors there is no executive record to reveal Frist's positions. As majority leader he hasn't shaped his own legislative profile, like John McCain, Chuck Hagel, Rick Santorum, or Sam Brownback have. He has adopted President Bush's agenda as his own on initiatives disfavored by conservatives, like the prescription-drug benefit, highway spending, the energy bill, and immigration, while parting ways on a fundamental pro-life issue that prompts Harry Reid to call him "courageous."

The suspicion about Senator Frist among conservatives is that he has no fixed political views - he has just confirmed that this is the case. The rap is that he is ineffective and his support for federal taxpayer funding will be ineffective - the President has pledged to veto it and his veto will stick even without Senator Frist. [emphases added]

As a practical matter Fristy's presidential ambitions died in the McCain Mutiny. That sorry debacle more than amply demonstrated his ineffectiveness, if not outright irrelevance. His cave-in on trying for another vote on John Bolton's UN Ambassador nomination, only to have a spine reinserted under his coat by the President, showed his, well, spinelessness. And this one, to my way of thinking, illustrated his piss-poor judgment.

Or, in more blunt terminology, his RINO judgment. Only a RINO could possibly be duped into believing it politically beneficial to stab his own president and party base supporters in the back on an emotional hot-button issue when he doesn't even have the stroke to twist the knife.

*sigh* I dunno, maybe Frist's "reasoning" was that since there aren't the votes to override a Bush veto of this ESCR bill anyway, he can afford to parrot the politically-correct view and garner a few days' non-unfavorable press coverage. But how does he spend a decade-plus in the U.S. Senate and not know that the GOP grassroots indellibly record for all posterity and time every such betrayal - when he also still harbors White House aspirations?

Take Catholic League president William Donahue as a case-in-point:

Here is what Senator John Kerry said when running for president: 'I believe life does begin at conception.' Here is what Senator Bill Frist is now saying: 'I believe human life begins at conception.' They now agree on one more thing: They will do absolutely nothing to protect the beginning of innocent human life.

Frist is worse than Kerry. Kerry, a lawyer, said his position on the beginning of human life was based on 'my Catholic belief.' Frist, a physician, says that while his Christian faith informs his position, there's more to it: 'But, to me, it isn't just a matter of faith. It's a fact of science.'

"And it's a fact of politics that Frist is such a hypocrite. His change of heart has nothing to do with any scientific breakthrough: there is no new evidence suggesting that the human embryo does not constitute human life, nor is there any evidence that embryonic stem cell research can be performed without killing embryos. What's changed is that Dr. Duplicity wants to be president.

"Frist still calls himself 'strong[ly] pro-life,' and says he gives 'huge moral significance to the human embryo.' Furthermore, he says the human embryo 'is nascent human life,' explaining that we should 'treat that embryo with dignity, with respect.' Which raises the question: If it's okay to snuff out the beginning of human life, how much dignity and respect may logically be accorded the dead?

"Frist says he is not going to run for senator of Tennessee again. Now it's up to the Republican leadership to make sure he has no future role to play in their party. Who knows, if Frist becomes increasingly Kerryesque, maybe the Dems will draft him?

Does that sound like a voter who is undecided about Dr. Doofus? Or who could carry, as President Bush did last November, a majority of the Catholic vote?

Even fellow elected Republicans were "disappointed" in the Frist flip-flop.

Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN), Chairman of the House Republican Study Committee:

House conservatives are profoundly disappointed that we have lost Senator Bill Frist to this cause, but this cause will prevail.

It was Ronald Reagan who said, 'We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life - the unborn - without diminishing the value of all human life.'

Ronald Reagan was right and Bill Frist is wrong.

I believe that life begins at conception and that a human embryo is human life. I believe it is morally wrong to create human life to destroy it for research. And I believe it is morally wrong to take the tax dollars of millions of pro-life Americans, who believe that human life is sacred, and use them to fund the destruction of human embryos for research.

And the man who is a real Majority Leader, Tom DeLay:

As you know, one of the principal tenets of the Republican Party is a profound respect for the dignity of all human life.

This respect has led to our party's strong pro-life positions, on issues from abortion to euthanasia to embryonic stem-cell research.

Of course, many of our party's most prominent members disagree with the platform on one issue or another, and Republicans' ability to have these substantive, thoughtful debates within our party is one of our principal strengths as a national governing coalition.

As a strong supporter in the dignity of every human life, regardless of its physical strength, mental capacity or familial situation, Senator Frist's announcement today that he now supports federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, which, by its very nature involves the destruction of innocent human life, is obviously disappointing.

Senator Frist is a good man; he is simply advocating a bad policy.

As a practical matter, embryonic stem-cell research doesn't work.

Adult stem-cell research - which does not involve the destruction of human life - has produced treatments for no fewer than 67 separate diseases.

Embryonic stem-cell research has produced none - it is a bad fiscal investment.

As a political matter, the federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research would spend on the destruction of human life the tax dollars of tens of millions of Americans who find such research morally reprehensible.

This research is going on now with privately funded money, and needn't force the American people and their money into such morally dicey matters.

As a logical matter, Senator Frist's position - which declares both profound respect for human life but also support for the federal funding of its destruction - can be boiled down to the argument that while all human lives is precious, some are more precious than others.

And as a moral matter, embryonic stem-cell research is based entirely on a logic in which the ends justify the means - one of the singular dangers of medical and personal ethics.

We all want to cure diseases, but the deliberate - let alone federally funded - destruction of innocent human life cannot be the means to that end.

The Hammer's hammer might have been encased in a velvet glove, but it raised a noggin lump just the same.

It also raised a point - about the vastly superior medical promise of adult stem cells - that has been discussed in this space before, and was revisited over at Newsmax again today:

[T]here's already been far more progress in adult stem cell science than its controversial cousin - while a growing body of experts say that the promise of embryonic research is being oversold to the public.

Just last month, Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal that favors embryonic stem cell research, called headlines touting its potential cures "sensationalist" and "hype."

"No safe and effective [embryonic] stem cell therapy will be widely available for at least a decade, and possibly longer," Lancet said.

Last year, embryonic stem cell research advocate Ron Reagan admitted [under duress, no doubt, after using his dad like the corpse in Weekend at Bernie's] that the science probably won't do anything to help those suffering from the disease that killed his father, telling MSNBC: "Alzheimer's is a disease, ironically, that probably won't be amenable to treatment through stem cell therapies."

In fact, since 1998, when researchers at the University of Wisconsin discovered how to isolate and develop human embryonic stem cells, no human disease or condition has been successfully treated with them.

Adult stem cell research, on the other hand, is already being used to safely and effectively treat more than 60 conditions.

The progress that the human clinical trials using adult stem cells represents is "unbelievably significant," Dr. Alan Levine told the Boston Globe last month. Levine is the former director of the blood disease program of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

Still, most media "seem to downplay these successes," complains quadriplegic stem cell science expert Jean Swenson, "while elevating embryonic stem cell cure 'potential.'" [emphases added]

To cut to the chase, embryonic stem cell research is a despicable fraud. So why does it get so stubbornly pushed by the left-wing establishment? Because it provides the pro-death crowd with something that, for all their years of dishonest demagoguery, they've never enjoyed before: a crack at the moral high ground.

After all, embryos don't look like human beings, any more than "fetuses" do; heck, they're not even visible to the naked eye. But unlike in abortion, where there really isn't any moralistic way of gussying up the fact that the "choice" still comes down to snuffing an innocent life based on a preggo's whim or an abortician's greedy urging, with embryonic stem cells they can depict the deliberate destruction of life as a panacea of cures for "real" (i.e. born) people, and those who oppose it as cruel, vicious, sadistic monsters who take great delight in watching people needlessly suffer. Insert evil, maniacal cackling here.

It is, in other words, the ultimate demagoguery. And Bill Frist has buckled to it.

But can we really be surprised after the woefully pitiful performance he's turned in thus far as Senate Majority Leader in the 109th Congress? After the way he's allowed himself to be dominated and outsmarted at every turn by Harry F'ing Reid? After he took so long to build up to the Constitutional option on judicial confirmations and then got blind-sided by Supreme Chancellor McCain?

In a strong, principled ruling party this defection would mean the end of Frist's leadership tenure. But the irony of this "last straw" is that by its very nature it won't "finalize" anything. As Trent Lott found out to his well-earned chagrin, it isn't weakness, fecklessness, and/or incompetence that gets a GOP Senate Majority Leader vented out the nearest airlock, but doing something that angers the political opposition. If Fristy had gone to the Senate floor this morning and declared both his undying opposition to embryonic stem cell research and concommitant commitment to adult stem cell research, and that the federally-funded research should begin by harvesting stem cells from Jesse Helms' nose, he'd find himself in a public relations maelstrom of a magnitude his Mississippi backbencher predecessor never dreamed of.

Jesse Helms and telling the truth = bad; parroting murderous lies and spreading your cheeks for the DisLoyal Opposition = good.

Thank God this bozo is retiring next year. But the damage, in terms of irretrievable opportunities and their implications for the '06 midterms, will be done.