For the week of August 15 - 21, 2001

Stem cell decision 
fails to equal hype

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

---

Voters with long memories and gray at the temples will consider the drama surrounding President Bush’s decision on embryonic stem cell research to be theater of the absurd.

For weeks, Bush aides filled the air with vivid and colorful descriptions of the president’s wrenching anguish, his prayerful meditation, his penetrating curiosity, the intolerable pressures, hours of lonely deliberations, gripping moral inner turmoil leading up to a decision that in the end was a limp cop-out designed to avoid offending anyone too much and that’ll only delay ultimate cures from stem cells.

Other modern presidents made far weightier and more compelling decisions without the dazzling fanfare this president’s circle of handlers needed to contrive to make his stature seem larger and the decision extraordinary.

Among others, Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era rescue programs to save a bankrupt nation and his go-ahead of the atomic bomb; Dwight Eisenhower’s decision when to launch the D-Day invasion of Europe; Harry Truman’s green light to drop the first atomic bombs and his postwar aid programs for Europe and Japan; Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with communist China; Ronald Reagan’s Cold War strategies; George Bush the Elder’s launch of U.S. forces against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

One wonders what theatrics White House script writers will need to produce if Bush the Junior is faced with a really big and momentous decision requiring genuine courage.

•

Here’s a real moral dilemma:

What will all those hand wringing, moralizing opponents to embryonic stem cell research do when miracle cures are found for catastrophic diseases — refuse treatment for terrible diseases for them and their families?

Don’t bet on it: the lines waiting for medicine will be filled with hypocrites who want the benefits of the research they wanted to stop.

•

Famous political boasts have a way of turning on those who utter them.

President Lyndon Johnson’s "victory is in sight" about the Vietnam War boomeranged and forced him into retirement.

"Read my lips — no new taxes" backfired on President Bush the Elder and contributed to his downfall.

And the newest phrase to turn on users is "family values," created by then-Vice President Dan Quayle, whose political career never went anywhere thereafter.

Democratic Congressman Gary Condit, now exposed as a serial adulterer, is a "family values" politician, building campaign ads around a photo of his wife and children.

"Family values" has backfired, too, on Republican Mayor Philip Giordano, of Waterbury, Conn., married and the father of three, who’s been arrested and charged with trying to seduce under-age girls on the Internet for sex.

The most celebrated victims of "family values" hypocrisy were President Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had an affair with an aide even as he railed against Clinton’s behavior with Monica Lewinsky.

Will more "family values" apostles be unmasked as pretenders and caught in flagrante delicto?

Newsweek magazine claims that 87 House and Senate members, presumably some who claim to be "family values" disciples, are cheating on their spouses.

Stay tuned.

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.