WTF?! Obama I thought you said .. [ Insert Obama Lie Here ]

Most surprising to me is not how radically leftist the President is showing himself to be in his policies and proposals, but how surprised others seem to be at the course he is taking.

Why exactly are Obama’s radical ideas shocking to anyone? What was it about everything Obama said during the campaign season that would make anyone think he was anything less than an honest-to-goodness, faithful, textbook Alinski-wing leftist? What exactly was it about a voting record that won him honors as the most liberal Senator in Washington – as well as a history of associations and activities with leftist anti-American radicals - that would lead card-carrying, self-professed liberals like CNBC’s “Mad Money” host, Jim Cramer, and billionaire Warren Buffet, to believe that The Messiah was a centrist?

Because they wished him to be?

Because Obama seems like such a nice guy?

Because he has the facility to deliver teleprompter prose with the tone and cadence of a moderate?

Radicals are not exclusively identified as angry, ranting, blathering, fist-pumping, banner waving Abbie Hoffman types with angled berets atop their heads and a need for deodorant. Being well groomed, even-tempered, and one who can read a script very well does not disqualify one from being a radical or a proponent of radical ideas.

As it is with most conservatives who paid attention during the campaign season, there isn’t a single thing Obama has said or done since his anointment that has taken me by surprise – from his announcement that Guantanamo Bay would be closed to yesterday’s green light on taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research (and all radically transforming stops in between) – the Obamacratic regime has, in my mind, followed the expected path: astronomical spending, social engineering, tax increases on the most productive, retreating from a war zone on a publicly announced date, rewarding failure … it’s all part of the same picture.

Yesterday’s Executive Order by President Obama was, arguably, the most radical move yet for the new President. What he did was more than just reverse the Bush Administration’s policy of not allowing taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research. He has actually allowed for the creation of brand new human embryos so that they might be destroyed for future experimentation.

From the great Moral Accountability Blog, Yuval Levin from the Ethics and Public Policy Center explains:

“… it will tell researchers that if they destroy a human embryo, they will become eligible for federal dollars to use in studying its cells; establishing an obvious and unprecedented incentive. And the president has not established any moral constraints whatsoever on funding: he has instructed the NIH (National Institutes of Health) to create the rules, so it’s safe to expect that they will permit not only the use of embryos “left over” after IVF (In vitro fertilization), but also those created solely to be destroyed for research, including those created by cloning. This is well beyond what even most advocates of overturning the Bush policy have tended to argue for in public.”

The idea that the President has opened the door to allowing human life to be created, only to be subsequently destroyed in order to research potential treatments that may theoretically save human lives sometime in the future is as convoluted and unethical as any position ever held by an American president – especially in light of the fact that another type of stem cell (the adult stem cell) has already been used with success to treat diseases, without having to destroy human life.

Levin says:

“What we do know, however, is that cells derived through the destruction of embryos left over after fertility treatment-the cells that President Obama’s executive order addresses-are far less useful, far less necessary, and far less appealing to researchers than they seemed eight years ago when the controversy surrounding federal stem cell funding policy began in earnest. This is a monumentally radical step the President has taken.”

Let’s be clear.

Despite what advocates are saying, this debate, at its core, has absolutely nothing to do with the advancement of science. Rather, it centers on the ethics of science. Understanding first and foremost that human embryos are human beings in the earliest stages of development, it isn’t – or it shouldn’t be - difficult to at least acknowledge the profound moral dilemma in giving the “okay” to fund their destruction with taxpayer dollars. It is critical to remember that an embryo is not something distinctly separate from a human being – it is simply a stage of life.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the main-stream media operates.

First, they disingenuously suggest to the public that President George W. Bush falt-out banned embryonic stem cell research, which he most certainly did not. However, because of Bush’s unwillingness to fund research on new stem cell lines, Bush was branded as an anti-science hayseed, in favor of letting folks like actor Christopher Reeves - paralyzed from the neck down after a horse riding accident - die without the opportunity of having government-backed research afford him the chance to walk again. Of course, the President of the United States has no such power to ban research. Bush was, in fact, the first President to allow federal funding for it - on already existing stem cell lines.

“George Bush killed Christopher Reeves” threads at some wacko liberal blogs were not uncommon when Mr. Reeves died in 2004.

Second, the word “embryonic” is often dropped so that all types of stem cell research are conveniently lumped together.

This morning, on his radio program, Dr. Bill Bennett had a fascinating and instructive discussion with Professor Robert P. George, Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

Professor George made these very important points:

“The question is, will we go forward on the basis of research that requires the destruction of human life in its earliest stages or will we find an alternative path?

What’s really discouraging about the President’s decision yesterday is that we have found an alternative path. There are alternatives to embryo-destructive research that have shown enormous promise.

Sometimes in the media we get bias here that’s plainly pro-embryo destruction.

Stem cells are simply primitive cells that can be manipulated by scientists in order to become different types of tissue …

Some can come from adult tissue - just a skin scraping, the equivalent of a blood draw - harmless and completely ethical. Those stem cells, by the way are the ones that so far have actually proven to be therapeutically useful. They’re being used in therapies to treat diseases.

The second kind of stem cells we call embryonic stem cells. Those don’t actually exist in embryos. But if you take the cells from an embryo, thus destroying the embryo in a normal case, you can induce in a lab culture what is called pluripotency - that is, that quality that enables the cells to be morphed or manipulated into different cell types.

The really exciting news is that in 2007, an enormous breakthrough happened that enabled us to produce the biological equivalent of embryonic stem cells, but without killing embryos. These are not adult stem cells … These are called induced pluripotent stem cells. And these begin with an adult cell or an ordinary body cell - it could be taken from a child - but harmlessly again.

You can take an ordinary body cell … and essentially reprogram that cell genetically … make it into a primitive cell, biologically equivalent to a stem cell which can then be morphed into whatever sort of tissue you need for regenerative medicine. Unlike adult cells, they are fully pluripotent, and in that respect they’re just like embryonic cells.”

That is a remarkable revelation. How many people are aware of this truth? Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume that the media should be interested in the science behind these induced pluripotent stem cells, which, as Professor George indicated, are the biological equivelant of embryonic stem cells?

The entire interview can be heard here in its entirety, directly from Bill Bennett’s “Morning In America” website. It is a must listen. Professor George is extraordinarily articulate and as compelling a guest as I’ve ever heard on talk radio.

Not that it would make a difference to the Obamacratic masses.

Like the junk science that propogates the Global Warming myth, this one is hard core leftist dogma.

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