By Dave Andrusko

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"Yesterday President Barack Obama issued an executive order that authorizes expanded federal funding for research using stem cells produced by destroying human embryos. The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being 'divisive' and even 'politicizing science.'"
     From "The President Politicizes Stem-Cell Research: Taxpayers have a right to be left out of it," by Robert George and Eric Cohen. Their op-ed appeared in today's Wall Street Journal.

"The executive order Obama signed omits any mention of ethical debate. ...But science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so."
     From "Science Over All?: The Temptation in Obama's Stem Cell Policy,"  by Yuval Levin, which appeared in this morning's Washington Post.

Long before pro-abortion Barack Obama became our nation's 44^th President, pro-lifers had taken the measure of the man. We quickly grasped that his seemingly inexplicable rise to political ascendancy could largely be explained by the simple truth that he'd been given a free pass, by the electorate and by the media!

I could list a dozen different areas in which the press chose not to exercise due diligence--to probe rather than to passively nod in agreement. But near the top is "advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being 'divisive,'" as Robert George and Eric Cohen put it in today's Wall Street Journal.

Put another way, Obama--the luckiest man I've seen in the 50 years I've watched politics–has been held almost completely unaccountable. He can propose positions that are held by only a tiny sliver of the American electorate. Yet because they are swathed in reassurances about "civility" and "finding common ground," Obama's opponents have found themselves checkmated.

In a display of insincerity (to put it politely) that is truly breathtaking, a man who is a genuine radical gets to pose as a "moderate."

Let's just take what he did Monday. NRLC's Douglas Johnson was one of the few people who made it abundantly clear yesterday what the Washington Post's Rob Stein implies in his opening sentence in today's paper: "President Obama's open-ended order lifting limits on federal funding for stem cell research raises the prospect that taxpayer money could be used for a much broader, much more controversial array of studies than many scientists, officials and activists anticipated." (Emphasis added.)

What's going on? Many proponents of harvesting stem cells from human embryos have hidden their real agenda with a justification which is as scary as it is missed by most people: the "they're going to die anyway" rationale.

The "only" embryos who would be lethally scavenged, we were assured, were so-called "left over" or "spare embryos" from IVF fertility clinics. Since they were not going to be implanted anyway, why not get some "good" out of them by "donating" them for research?

We've explained why this is profoundly wrong on many occasions, so let me stay on point. While no doubt some embryonic stem cell proponents would "limit" themselves to hollowing out the innards of "spare embryos," the cutting edge types--and certainly many researchers--never saw this as more than a speed bump on the road to cloning embryos.

Their real objective--the bioethical Promised Land--was the unfettered right to create life that they could then experiment on and destroy. It is a fundamental leap into an abyss that Obama's "open-ended" order would do nothing to thwart. Indeed, far from talking researchers down off the ledge, Obama is shouting, "Jump!"

He hides this in a number of ways. Let me mention two. Number one is classic misdirection/dissembling: Obama insists he is against "cloning."   

But Obama is for human cloning. He hides this by taking refuge in the dishonest and scientifically absurd distinction between cloning that produces a human embryo that is killed (which is fine with him) and cloning that produces a human embryo that is implanted in a woman's womb and brought to term (wrong, at least for now). Whether experimented on or implanted, the human embryo came into existence via cloning.

A second way Obama disguises what he is doing, paradoxically, is to offer what is an almost comically transparent bogus cover. He penned a "Scientific Integrity" memorandum–-no "politics" or "ideology" need apply. By politics and ideology, Harold Varmus, the co-chairman of Obama's scientific advisory council, means any check on what "scientists" want to do. They are not kidding: they want an absolute blank check.

However, as Yuval Levin brilliantly explains today in his Washington Post op-ed, questions that raise the most fundamental issues about who we are as a people and the limits to which we will descend Obama wants to reduce to mere technical questions. "In a prior iteration of that debate, while he was serving in the Senate, Obama told reporters that 'the promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgment of science, and we deserve a president who will put that judgment first,'" Levin writes.

"This is a concise articulation of the technocratic temptation in science policy, reaffirmed by the president's remarks yesterday. It argues not for an ethical judgment regarding the moral worth of human embryos but, rather, that no ethical judgment is called for: that it is all a matter of science."

But it isn't merely a matter of "science." Science is, in Levin's lovely phrase, a "handmaiden," not the unchallenged source of all authority which is to reign unchecked by our collective judgment.

(You can read the op-ed in its entirety at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/09/AR2009030902233.html)

Obama has given the NIH 120 days to answer a raft of thorny questions, including whether the federal government--you and me--will underwrite studies based on stem cells that came from embryos specifically created in order to be experimented on. With your help we will be fighting this tooth and nail.