Bush makes illogical decision ““ so what else is new?

  Doug Lief Lief is a fourth-year English
student who would like to urge all of you to use your connections
to help him out. Contact him at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Doug Lief

President Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can’t
please all of the people all of the time, but you can please some
of the people some of the time.” With his stem cell decision,
President George W. Bush proved that even though he’s of the
party of Lincoln, he’s more of an inept hair-splitter than a
great rail-splitter.

So, on Aug. 9, Bush laid the smack down on the embryos by
approving just enough funding to piss off the Christian right (who
honestly hasn’t had anything to smile about since the Salem
Witch Trials).

He also, however, put enough conditions on that funding so that
the volume of stem cells will be grossly inadequate to accommodate
the volume of research. In one fell swoop, Bush alienated millions
of religious conservatives as well as millions of the terminally
ill. In other words, it’s a win-win situation ““ for the
Democrats in 2004, that is.

Bush made the decision from his Crawford, Texas, ranch, where he
has spent most of the last month having nap time and apple juice.
He ended his address to the nation by saying, “It is a tough
decision, and I pray, the right one. And I sure hope Michael J.
Fox’s kids aren’t watching right now.”

  Illustration by RODERICK ROXAS/Daily Bruin As Will
Ferrell might say, “strategery” isn’t
Bush’s strong suit. This decision was designed not to anger
the Republican Party’s religious conservative base. But if
anything other than an outright ban was going to make them throw a
hissy fit anyway, then there was no reason for him not to go whole
hog on the stem cells.

We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. After
all, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few
eggs.

The good news for all of us who may one day have degenerative
illnesses is that countries like Sweden have tons of embryos lying
around. There is just no way in hell that Sweden could have that
many gorgeous women without some kind of eugenics program at work.
They’ll probably not only make the breakthroughs, but the big
bucks as well.

Americans who need those treatments will pay for them through
the nose, which is oddly enough the way Bush takes most of his
medication.

I think, however, that Bush can be prevailed upon to change his
mind. From where I stand, it comes down to two simples premises: 1)
Bush made the decision based on ethical considerations, and 2) Bush
has ethics.

First, Bush did not make the decision based on ethical
considerations ““ at least not his own. His concern was that
his voting base’s ethical considerations would get in the
way. Just think how much better off our country would be if we got
the convicts and Australia got the Puritans.

At best, the ethics of the Puritans’ Christian right
descendants are too skewed to use for a nationally binding moral
standard. The reasoning goes like this: if something has potential
human life, then you can’t kill it, ergo no killing embryos.
However, the contra-positive of that statement is where we get into
trouble. If we killed something ““ or did nothing to intervene
with a death ““ then, by our original principle, it must have
had no life potential. Bye-bye, Marty McFly.

The question isn’t whether or not we value human life. We
all do. The question is whether or not we value theoretical human
life over literal human life. I’ll miss Alex P. Keaton. I
won’t miss a test tube.

The conservative voters have already left Bush on this one
““ so can we prove he doesn’t really have a sense of
ethics at all?

Since he just approved drilling in the Arctic Refuge, it seems
as if ethics aren’t his top priority. It takes pretty big
cojones to ruin a place with the word “refuge” in its
title. How can the Republican Party get so upset over the sanctity
of one embryo while they endorse anti-environmentalist policies
that threaten the very future of the whole species?

I say we just tell Bush that we can get fuel out of the embryos.
He’ll drill anything. After all, George, baby oil has to come
from somewhere. Or, given Bush’s record as governor of Texas,
we could create the embryos from the sperm and egg cells of
death-row inmates. Bush’ll have no problem killing them.