Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Joe Biden's breath smells like his feet

Sen. Biden is a dope and unfortunately thinks he's brilliant. This attitude was best summed up in a political cartoon in 1987 during the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork -- the cartoonist drew something akin to this exchange:

Biden: Judge Bork, 2+2 = 4

Bork: Yes, Senator Biden, but f(a)+\frac{f'(a)}{1!}(x-a)+\frac{f''(a)}{2!}(x-a)^2+\frac{f^{(3)}(a)}{3!}(x-a)^3+\cdots\,,.

which showed the relative intellects of the two (and the equation reads better here.

Today, the Senator from the MBNA state said this:

I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?

That bout of insensitivity, combined with the liberal's blind passion for embryonic stem cell research (non-embryonic stem cell research is supported by Republicans) is typical of Biden. Yuval Levin, who follows this subject closely, noted:

. . . while stem cell work, including embryonic stem cell research, can help in the study of human development in general, as a matter of basic science, the notion that it offers a path to the treatment of Down syndrome or other developmental disabilities is just not sound. The basic science (which at its edges could have some impact on the study of developmental disabilities) can be and has been pursued under the Bush administration’s stem cell policy, and even the most adamant advocates of the policies Biden has supported have not listed a cure for Down syndrome among the miracles they promise. Biden’s remark is indicative of the lack of seriousness with which some Democratic politicians treat the relevant science here: they don’t themselves think this is one avenue of cell biology that could offer important help in one range of potential biomedical advances but rather they see it as a kind of magic bullet and universal cure-all that allows them to be for curing all that ails the human race and accusing their opponents of being against it all, meanwhile paying no heed to ethical concerns.

And of course Biden's press secretary said this falsehood: We've heard not a dime's worth of difference between the McCain-Palin ticket and the Bush Administration on medical breakthroughs [through stem-cell research].

Don't tell anyone the truth. What is the truth? It's not what Biden's lackey said: Levin notes that McCain "voted to overturn the president’s stem cell policy, just like Joe Biden did" and ultimately, "the example Palin sets in how she and her family have welcomed her Down syndrome child points in precisely the opposite direction from Biden’s call for the destruction of human embryos for research: it . . . treats every human life as deserving of protection and regard."

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