Quaker Agitator is Right

In the history of this blog I have referenced other authors and other sites, but have never pasted the comments of another blogger here in their entirity. Today that changes. To select sections of this post and then provide a link over to the originating page simply isn't good enough. These comments are too passionate, too articulate, too honest, and too powerful to be cut up.

From Quaker Agitator:

Yesterday, the United States Senate voted 63-37 to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. In most polls, upwards of 70% of Americans - as represented by this vote count - approve of using federal money for this research.

Today, the president of the United States - not "the President of the Family Research Council" or "The President of Focus on the Family" - but the President of all of the people of the United States used the power of his office to veto this bill, the only time in six years that he has ever used it. And it looks as if the Senate will not be able over-ride that veto, which is what they should do if they really wanted to carry out the will of the people.

In vetoing the bill, the president surrounded himself with a group of little children who had all, one presumes, once been embryos. I noticed that he included no children who suffer from juvenile diabetes, no folks like my sister who daily have to deal with the ravages of multiple sclerosis, no people like Michael J. Fox whose lives are slowing coming undone due to Parkinson's disease. They were all embryos once, too.

I was pretty sure before this afternoon, but now I am forever convinced that George W. Bush is absolutely, positively the worst president in the history of this country, and that history will remember him that way as well.

I grew up during the Vietnam War era. I came of age as Richard Nixon came to power, and that has always shaped my political thinking. For a time, during my teenage years, I thought we could never have a worse president than Nixon. He ran for office promising to end the war, and then expanded it - secretly - committing what amounted to a war crime with his bombing of Cambodia. He claimed to support civil rights, but came to power through the use of the GOP's infamous "southern strategy," which haunts us still. He made permanent the public's distrust of its political institutions because of the Watergate scandal and associated crimes. And that's just the tip of the Nixon iceberg. The day he stepped onto the steps of that helicopter, turned, and waved to the cameras, my mother wept, not for him, but for what he had done to America.

As bad as Nixon was, St. Ronald of California, whose face some conservatives want placed on our money, was worse. From the opening of his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi - the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 - Reagan divided this nation along the lines of race and class. He allowed a shadow government to literally operate in the basement of the people's house to subvert the will of Congress, break the law, and sell arms to terrorists, the same terrorists we are fighting today. His economic plan benefited the wealthy, devastated the poor, and took eight years of Clintonomics to clean up. His crimes are myriad, and too many to explore here. I thought then that he was as bad as we'd ever get.

So much for that.

I won't even try to list all that's wrong with this regime: it's well-documented all over the place anyway. His warmongering and wanton destruction of human life overseas is bad enough all by itself. His religious hypocrisy and blatant disregard for America's standing in the world has done lasting damage to our nation. As a teacher, I see daily the destructive impact his education policies have done to public education, which, of course, was exactly what they were intended to do: destroy it. But there is no forgiving this. There is no redemption from this. This is not about being "pro-life," and for this man to invoke the word "life" in any context as he killed this legislation simply showed the depth of his depraved inhumanity. Millions of Americans and their families and those who care about them and who care for them will live each minute of each hour of every day with the consequences of his contempt. In serving his tiny constituency of zealots and frauds and moneyed patrons with this veto, George Bush has condemned countless others to perhaps a generation of suffering and death. Because without the seal of approval - and the money - that goes with federal support, vital research in this field will be stymied and delayed.

All because this person and his advisors and those whom he really serves cannot (or choose not to) differentiate a frozen embryo from a real, live, breathing person.

Recently, I wanted to post - in satirical fashion - about the illogic used by those (like Sean Hannity and Jonah Goldberg and the rest) who blindly support this president at every turn and who use every chance they get to claim that any opposition to Bush amounts to "hating." That's the stock line from the GOP talking points and from the Karl Rove Playbook: make dissent about "hatred" of the president as a person, not about real, legitimate dissent. It's such an easy out, and it works so well, too. It's hard to argue against such simple-minded "reasoning." The point of my post would have been that's it's hard to deal with people who cannot tell the difference (or who choose not to) between those who genuinely hold an individual in comtempt, and having contempt for what that person says and does.

But today, however, in my case, may God forgive me, but those folks might be right.