The Case Against Bush

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Registered: 08-04-2004
The Case Against Bush
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Wed, 08-11-2004 - 6:20pm
The Case Against George W. Bush

The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees

By Ron Reagan

September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3

Illustration by Tim O'Brien


It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.

Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush—and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood—a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.

The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too—a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.

None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.

Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.


THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq.

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Registered: 07-05-2003
Wed, 08-11-2004 - 8:36pm
Ron Reagan Jr. missed a great opportunity on a recent Tuesday night.

He came to the stage of the Democratic National Convention with the stated agenda of making a plea for the cause of scientific progress. Many of us suspected that his not-so-hidden agenda was simply to use his father’s name to score political points against George W. Bush.

He could have proved us wrong. He could have walked in his father’s footsteps.

Now I don’t presume to know how President Reagan himself would have felt about the very difficult subject of stem cell research. But I do believe that if he had agreed with his son on this topic, he would have been intellectually consistent enough to do more than tell his audience what it wanted to hear. He would have done Democrats a real service by highlighting the contradictory beliefs held within their party.

When it comes to animal research, the Democrats’ big tent is home to some extreme groups who use intimidation—terror, even—to thwart scientists from working toward new life-saving, life-enhancing pharmaceuticals. In recent months, drug companies have witnessed threats to workers’ families, bricks thrown through windows, defamatory graffiti sprayed on walls, and the destruction of property.

Another Leftist attack on science comes in the form of severe regulations or outright prohibition of genetically modified (GM) foods. The developing world can accelerate its progress towards agricultural self-sufficiency if we harness scientific methods of improving crop yields. Yet a coalition of trade protectionists and environmental alarmists has advocated a “precautionary principle,” which forbids the use of GM foods until they can be proven to have no side effects. This prohibition has undermined the industry’s development and continues to exact a human toll in areas where starvation still claims millions of lives.

If the Left really believes in the imperative of scientific progress, how can it confine its advocacy only to testing on human embryos? If you are comfortable destroying early-stage human life for science, how can you rail against tests on lab rats? If tinkering with human genes is ethical, how can it be bad to genetically modify corn?

If Ron Reagan Jr. had asked these simple questions, he would have earned my respect. He would have demonstrated a similarity to his father, who would not pander to an audience when he had the chance to persuade.

Recall that in the early days of Reagan's political activism he revised his usual after-dinner speech about the threat of neo-fascism. A pastor friend had recommended that Reagan look into another dangerous “ism”: communism. It was a subject Reagan had not thought much about, but in his next speech in front of a citizens’ group in Hollywood, he added a new line at the end: “If I ever find evidence that communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak out just as harshly against communism as I have fascism.” The stunned silence that greeted Reagan woke him up to the nature of the audience he was speaking to and to the threat that communism was becoming. Needless to say, Reagan did not drop the anti-communist rhetoric from his future speeches.

Nearly 40 years later, President Reagan gave his famous speech at the Berlin Wall. Other leaders would have delivered a very different message. After all, Gorbachev had enacted some freedom-oriented reforms in the USSR, and he may have expected some praise from Reagan for these compromises in his direction. But Reagan was a passionate advocate of freedom and he could not countenance intellectual inconsistency. So he pointed at the most obvious contradiction that remained: “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.” That sign was to tear down that wall.

Obviously, no one expected such drama from Ron Jr.’s speech. But he could have shown a more sincere interest in its subject: how we ought to remove obstacles that are slowing down the progress of science.

By failing to acknowledge the anti-science biases of factions of his Boston audience, Ron Jr. only validated that his true interest was far narrower. He wanted to please his friends in the Democratic Party, who in turn wanted to use him to embarrass President Bush, without the discomfort of analyzing the contradictions of their own positions.

That’s something President Ronald Reagan would not have done.

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Registered: 07-05-2003
Wed, 08-11-2004 - 8:40pm
Ron Reagan, the younger son of the late Republican president,gave a prime-time address in support of stem cell research at the Democratic National Convention in Boston recently.

"Ron Reagan's courageous pleas for stem cell research add a powerful voice to the millions of Americans hoping for cures for their children, for their parents and for their grandparents," said a spokesman for John Kerry to the Associated Press.

Reagan told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the speech was intended "to educate people about stem cell research" rather than be critical of President George Bush. But the Kerry campaign seems to want to scare people by having the son of the revered late President Ronald Reagan decry President Bush and his pro-life supporters as the major roadblocks to a host of supposedly just-around-the-corner miracle cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other dreaded diseases.

It was a junk science-fueled spectacle.

The controversy centers around the use of stem cells derived from destroyed human embryos. So-called "embryonic stem cells (search)" give rise to all other cells and tissues in the human body and have been touted as possibly yielding treatments for a variety of diseases.

Moral concerns over the destruction of human embryos caused President Bush to limit taxpayer funding for embryonic stem cell research to stem cell lines already in existence. Researchers who were counting on taxpayer funding to conduct research on embryonic stem cells — and then rake in millions of dollars from naive investors — were enraged and began a campaign to pressure the President into opening the taxpayer spigots for embryonic stem cell research on the basis of a wide-eyed hope that cures are near at hand.

Though embryonic stem cell research advocates euphemistically refer to the current state of research as an "early stage," the unfortunate reality is the goal of embryonic stem cell therapies is, at this point, more accurately described as a pipe dream. No researcher is anywhere close to significant progress in developing practical embryonic stem cell therapies.

Mouse embryonic stem cells were first grown in a laboratory in 1981. It took 20 years to make similar achievements with human embryonic stem cells — and merely growing stem cells is no where close to employing those cells in therapies. Embryonic stem cells must be directed to grow into specific cell types and that growth must be controlled — they can proliferate indefinitely in the lab. Uncontrolled stem cell growth may have tumor-forming potential. Because embryonic stem cells don't come from the patient being treated, there may also be problems associated with immune system rejection following transplantation of foreign stem cells.

The difficulty of embryonic stem cell research is underscored by the lack of progress in cancer research. Despite a 30-year, $40-billion "War on Cancer" launched by President Nixon, researchers continue to have great difficulty in controlling, let alone eradicating, the vast majority of cancer cell growth. Conceptually, controlled deployment of "good" stem cells should be vastly more complex than simply destroying "bad" cancer cells.

None of this is to say that embryonic stem cell research can't possibly lead to some improvements in biological understanding or future therapeutic treatments, but such speculative progress of who-knows-what value isn't in the foreseeable future. The only thing certain is that the cost of that research will be high. If embryonic stem cell research had real and imminent possibilities, private investors would be pouring capital into research hoping for real and imminent profits. Instead, venture capital firms are contributing to political efforts to get taxpayers to fund research.

A proposed ballot initiative in California known as Proposition 71 (search) would provide $3 billion in taxpayer money for stem cell research. Supporters hope to raise $20 million to get the initiative passed. What the venture capitalists seem to be hoping for is that taxpayer funding of stem cell research will increase the value of their stakes in biotech companies. The venture capitalists can then cash out at a hefty profit, leaving taxpayers holding the bag of fruitless research.

The spectacle of Ron Reagan at the Democratic Convention was sad — the disgruntled son of the beloved former president misleading the public with naive hopes while being exploited for political gain by opponents of his father's party. That cynical strategy may get John Kerry a few more votes in November, but it's not going to produce any medical miracles anytime soon, if at all.