Nancy Reagan Will Have Your Balls on a Platter:
Of all the mistakes the Bush political machine has made lately, starting with trying to campaign on a non-existent record to attempting to smear John Kerry's Vietnam record, the one that may come back to haunt them worse than any other is the dissing of Nancy Reagan in the wake of her husband's funeral. And, even worse, Bush sent his bitch out to do his bidding, making the first response to the former first lady come from Laura Bush, one of the most powerless first ladies in history.

It wasn't even the fact that Bush didn't change "his mind" on the issue of embryonic stem cell research. It was the patriarchal tone of the remarks, from Laura backin' her man, to the pat-on-the-head "we know better than you" words of Scott "The Claws of Satan Are Already Tearing At My Soul" McClellan: "The president doesn't believe we should be creating life for the sole purpose of destroying life." Which is really a cover-our-asses line because the converse can easily be argued: "Destroying a potential 'life' for the greater good of saving lives." The NIH says they're not true embryos, anyway, but, you know, that's science and we slept through biology because of all those, um, Bible studies. And, hey, isn't it time to scrub that website?

See, it'd be a moral and logical consistency for the Bush administration to support embryonic stem cell research. And logical consistency ain't a hallmark of this President. Here's the President back in the heady days before 9/11, when he couldn't talk about killin' people: "It lies at a difficult moral intersection, juxtaposing the need to protect life in all its phases with the prospect of saving and improving life in all its stages." The "it" in that sentence is, of course, stem cell research, about which we were assured constantly that the President was grappling with. But, you know, it could just as easily have been about Iraq, could it not? If, you know, the President had grappled with the moral implications of preemptive war.

In other words, it's not okay to fund research that might benefit millions of people because the foundation of that research is an unimplanted, frozen, lab-created embryo that will be disposed of anyway. However, it is okay to send thousands of Americans to die and to kill untold thousands of Iraqis in an "experiment" that might benefit millions of people. Now, ask yourself: What is more likely to happen - that we'll find out embryonic stem cells are, in fact, the keys to solving Parkinson's and other diseases, or that democracy will bloom in Iraq?

Do not fuck with Nancy Reagan. It's a simple truism of D.C. Some say the reason the flowers in the Rose Garden bloom so bright red is because of all the eviscerated bodies Nancy buried there. James Watt ground up into a fine fertilizer, ironically enough. Nancy's got the AARP on her side, she's got science on her side, and she has the horrible cries of late stage Ronnie, screaming at the ghosts of disappeared Salvadorans, echoing in her head.