"Profoundly Misleading to the Point of
Mendacity"
Part One of
Two
By Dave
Andrusko
Editor's
note. Be sure also to post this TN&V on
your social networking pages by going to
www.nrlc.org/News_and_views/Mar09/nv031309.html
and clicking on the "Share"
button.
Part Two talks about the
effort to bind physicians' consciences
in Canada.
"This
administration promised to be
transparent: Instead it is opaque. It
promised to heal divisions: Instead it
is worsening them. It promised honesty,
but its policy arguments are profoundly
misleading to the point of mendacity.
The only reason he can get away with it
is that the media remains immersed in
the tank. If that ever changes, Obama
could be in deep political trouble."
From "Dishonesty Piled Upon Dishonesty by Obama
Administration on Stem Cells," found at
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog.
"Statutes
that curtail [a woman's] abortion choice
are disturbingly suggestive of
involuntary servitude, prohibited by the
Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced
pregnancy requires a woman to provide
continuous physical service to the fetus
in order to further the state's asserted
interest."
From a brief submitted by NARAL in the 1989 Supreme
Court case of Webster v. Reproductive
Health Services. Dawn Johnsen, NARAL
legal director from 1988 to 1993, is
pro-abortion
President Barack Obama's nominee to head
the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel.
On Friday's
it's my habit to cobble together brief
synopses of several items of interest to
our growing audience. Today, instead, I
will be offering in Part One several
examples to illustrate one point,
perfectly described by Wesley Smith as
the Obama Administration's way of
presenting its arguments in a manner
that is "profoundly misleading to the
point of mendacity."
We're written
several times about Obama's revolting
new stem cell policy. It wasn't just
that he pitched overboard pro-life
President George Bush's carefully
nuanced, morally coherent policy on the
use of embryonic stem cells (Bush would
allow no federal financial incentives to
encourage the deaths of human embryos).
With a wink and a nod, Obama is
signaling the usual set in Congress and
the research community that it would be
okay to go way beyond the use of
so-called "spare embryos," including
creating human embryos by the use of
cloning.
NRLC's
Douglas Johnson explained it well.
"Obama's order places our society on a
very steep, very slippery slope. Many
researchers will not be satisfied to use
only so-called surplus embryos. Many
researchers are already demanding
federal support for research in which
human embryos would be created for the
specific purpose of research, through
human cloning and other methods, and
there was nothing in the President's
remarks today to limit NIH to the use of
so-called surplus embryos created in IVF
clinics."
What
particularly drew Wesley Smith's ire was
a patently disingenuous piece authored
by Melody Barnes, the president's
domestic policy adviser. Bad enough that
Barnes ignored "that adult stem cells
have shown tremendous promise in early
human trials for most of the conditions
she mentions." Worse yet Barnes again
raised high the banner of harvesting
stem cells from human embryos, which has
no track record of success in human
beings.
But even
worse than that, in some ways, is that
Barnes claimed credit for something she
could only do so by brazenly turning
truth on its head: asserting that Obama
was being "tough on preventing ethical
slippery slopes," as Smith phrased it.
Contrary to
Barnes' assertion, Obama is not
responsible for prohibiting the NIH
"from funding research during which an
embryo is destroyed." That's prohibited
by the Dickey-Wicker Amendment which
Obama would need a change by Congress to
overturn.
In that vein
Smith made a very important additional
observation/warning. "Notice," he wrote,
Barnes "does not promise a veto of any
attempt to change that law, which as I
noted in an earlier post, is already
being advocated by the Left's primary
media outlet, the New York Times."
Columnist
Charles Krauthammer had this withering
observation about Obama's pretentious
and wholly insincere add-on to his
policy change: a "scientific
memorandum" in which Obama claimed to be
"restoring scientific integrity to
government decision-making." He first
noted that President Bush had used a
nationally televised speech to enunciate
his policy on embryonic stem cell, "the
most morally serious address on medical
ethics ever given by an American
president."
Krauthammer
contrasted this with Obama's address
which "was morally unserious in the
extreme" and "populated, as his didactic
discourses always are, with a forest of
straw men."
Krauthammer's
overarching conclusion is critically
important as we look ahead. "Science has
everything to say about what is
possible. Science has nothing to
say about what is permissible. Obama's
pretense that he will 'restore science
to its rightful place' and make science,
not ideology, dispositive in moral
debates is yet more rhetorical sleight
of hand--this time to abdicate
decision-making and color his own
ideological preferences as authentically
'scientific.'" [Emphasis added]
Obama is
larding his Administration with
pro-abortionists, which is hardly a
surprise to us. At some level it may not
even be unexpected to many Americans,
including some of those who talked
themselves into believing Obama was a
moderate in search of "common ground" on
abortion.
Andrew
McCarthy has done yeoman work tracking
one of Obama's nominees in particular.
When Dawn Johnsen
was legal director at NARAL from 1988 to
1993,
it authored a friend of the court brief
in the 1989 case of Webster v.
Reproductive Health Services. Obama
has nominated Johnsen to head the
Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel.
Again, no
surprise, on two grounds. First, this
position is very influential, including
running shotgun on legal briefs
submitted to the Supreme Court. Obama is
going to want somebody who is hip-deep
in abortion advocacy.
But the
second reason, while not surprising, is,
nonetheless, deeply regrettable:
refusing to tell the truth. Under
questioning by the Senate Judiciary
Committee, Johnsen tried furiously to
wiggle out of conceding what she had
clearly written in a footnote in the
Webster case: that she equated
unplanned pregnancies with slavery.
It was not
only there in black and white, it also
was reflective of a way of looking at
pregnancy and abortion that permeated
the entire brief. Let me offer a long
quote from McCarthy's essay found at
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YThjODY2NmIzMDc0OTNiMGI5MmNlNGRhOTFiOWMyODQ=&w=MA==
"Johnsen's
statement maintaining that she 'made no
Thirteenth Amendment argument,' is
simply not true. No matter how you slice
it, footnote 23 is a Thirteenth
Amendment argument. Bear in mind, we are
talking here about a brief filed in the
United States Supreme Court. These are
the nation's most significant cases, and
there are tight restrictions on the
length of such submissions -- litigants
don't raise the Thirteenth Amendment on
a lark. They invoke it when they are
trying to persuade the justices that the
controversy at issue is so comparable to
involuntary servitude that it should be
treated the same way American law treats
slavery: namely, that it should be
barred as a violation of the
Constitution. I did not pull the terms
prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment,
involuntary servitude, and conscription
out of thin air; they are the words
Johnsen herself used to make her
points."
Conclusion?
Obama is a radical on abortion, and
denies it, and he surrounds himself with
kindred radical souls, who also deny it.
One
additional point. Howard Fineman writes
for Newsweek and functions as a
particularly sensitive barometer of the
Media Establishment's conventional
wisdom. He wrote a piece earlier this
week titled, "A Turning Tide? Obama
still has the approval of the people,
but the establishment is beginning to
mumble that the president may not have
what it takes."
It's a
perfect example of the "inside the
beltway" story–-the chattering class
gossiping with one another. And in the
end Fineman's conclusion is that
whatever his problems may be, they
largely stem from Obama just being too
polite and too scholarly a guy. (In
other words, if things go south, it
will not be because Obama was wrong on
a host of critical issues but because he
was done in by his own sweetness.)
The operative
sentence comes early: "But, in ways both
large and small, what's left of the
American establishment is taking his
measure and, with surprising swiftness,
they are finding him lacking." However
overstated that may be at this
point in time, I believe it foreshadows
a problem where the chickens will indeed
come home to roost.
It is easy to
argue that the only point of constancy
in an Administration that jumps from one
issue to another like a frog from one
lily pad to another, is abortion. There
Obama is laser-like in his single-minded
focus and intensity.
It's kind of
like the response of the family whose
house is on fire. Which items do they
take with them? In Obama's case, will it
be the economy? National defense? The
housing market?
Nope. While
everything else threatens to go up in
flames, Obama scoops up not only the
right to kill unborn babies, at home and
aboard, but also grabs the satchels of
money he wants shoveled into the
insatiable maw of organizations such as
Planned Parenthood.
And for good
measure, he races back into the house to
find a flashlight to signal his openness
to creating human life for the express
purpose of lethally experimenting on it.
That, my
friends, is radical by anyone's
definition.
Please send
your comments to Dave Andrusko at
daveandrusko@gmail.com.
Part Two
--
The Attack on Conscience in Canada
