Stem Cell Fairy Tales

Charles Krauthammer lays waste to Edwards' claim to be Vice-Messiah.

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.

(For those who don't know, Charles is wheelchair bound as he notes in this piece.)

What I thought most interesting (since I'm now fairly desensitized to the shameless idiocy of John John) was this nugget:

[Kerry] 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.

Color me naive, but this astounded me.

The following is a two-pronged fork skewering both John John and the LameStream Media:

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."

My heart will stop in shock if the AP notes these facts in the next article where Christ-like KEdward claim they can get Reeve out of his wheelchair (if not his grave) with their stem cell fairy tale.

I will live to a ripe old age I'm afraid.