"You Gotta Believe Enema!"
My brothers and I used to laugh at the clowns on Sunday mornings disguised as televangelist preachers ---with their bizarre oratorical affectations and flights of fantasy. Some spoke in tongues, even, while others simply ripped off their speaking styles from black guys who never had a show on the TV. And the thing about Jesus, they'd hysterically tell you, is that "you gotta believe in him-uh!" ---which we understood to be "You gotta believe enema!"

I prefer that understanding.

No wonder I've been turned off of religion for more than 20 years.

But now we're in danger of having another blow-dried Baptist-type charlatan too close to power. In remarks made yesterday upon hearing the news of Christopher Reeve's unfortunate death, John Edwards told a crowd in Illinois that

"When John Kerry is the president people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk again!"

Got that? The Democratic Vice Presidential nominee/con artist is not only using Nancy Reagan's example to "shame" this Republican President into going beyond his own personal ethical limits with respect to stem cell research, but now he claims that Bush is somehow responsible for keeping quadripelegics in their chairs. What garbage!

Or am I mistaking Edwards' chickenshit for some even stranger belief in John Kerry's supernatural healing powers?

This stem cell thing has been one of the Democrats' most successful lies this election season and I wouldn't really expect them to abandon it now. But it might help to know that not only has George W. Bush been the first President to actually make Federal funds available for this sort of research, but he has neither the power nor the inclination to ban private researchers from pursuing any number of stem cell lines they wish.

Moreover, stem cell research is not a panacea for nervous or other organic diseases; it is simply one approach out of many. A lot of it is speculative and theoretical. I personally support its full development, but I'm not stupid enough to believe that the religious Right in this country has been standing in the way of a full range of immediately implementable drugs, therapies, and transplants that could have solved all human disease at some time in the last four horrible, GOP-oppressed years.

So let's review: 1) The Kerrion are chickenshits for trying to use stem cell research and Nancy Reagan's support of it to politically damage the President; 2) John Edwards is a chickenshit for using a man's death to score points with a celebrity-obsessed electorate; 3) Edwards may also either be an ignorant tool who still thinks he's addressing a jury in a tort case and/or he believes that John Kerry is Jesus H. Christ; 4) Stem cell research is not the Fountain of Youth or a cup of ambrosia or a silver bullet or anything else; it is a general line of inquiry into arriving at a cure for many different diseases; 5) The President has actually funded some of this research with our tax money; 6) The President, regardless of his own ethical questions, has no ability or interest in keeping private researchers from exploring as many lines of stem cells as they wish. They'll just have to do it without public money ---which is fine since they're going to be making an investment in their own future profitability by doing this research, anyway.

Thank you for your time.

CORRECTION: Edwards was in Newton, Iowa (not Illinois)when he gave witness to Kerry's healing powers.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is a surgeon, said:

"I find it opportunistic to use the death of someone like Christopher Reeve -- I think it is shameful -- in order to mislead the American people," Frist said. "We should be offering people hope, but neither physicians, scientists, public servants or trial lawyers like John Edwards should be offering hype.

"It is cruel to people who have disabilities and chronic diseases, and, on top of that, it's dishonest. It's giving false hope to people, and I can tell you as a physician who's treated scores of thousands of patients that you don't give them false hope."

Bitch-slapped.