Why George Bush will be remembered as the Great President he is (Iraq Included)

Word for word from the Anchoress (because i could not have said it better):

When Republicans complain to me about how George W. Bush has “betrayed” them or “let them down,” I try to re-iterate things he has done, positions he has taken, that they tend to forget. Like his refusal to submit his nation to the International Criminal Court and his refusal to hog-tie us to the very unworkable Kyoto Treaty that the press likes to pretend enjoyed huge support in Congress (they rejected it unanimously). And I always remind them that in August of 2001, he drew a line in the sand on Embryonic Stem Cell Research and said, “no, we’re not publicly funding it.”

Bush’s stance that initially won him favorable responses from such advocates as diabetic Mary Tyler Moore. Bush’s well-thought out position was actually pretty well received - before the machines of distortion got to chew on things a bit.

MARY TYLER MOORE, ACTRESS: Well, I am so pleased with the thought and care that he put into making this decision. And I think it is a good one. I was not aware — or when I say “I” I should say the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation — was not aware that there are, in fact, 60 embryos waiting. But if there are, that is good. That is better than 6 or 7 or 8, which would have really posed a problem.

I welcome the forming of this council that he spoke about. And I hope that the JDFR will be able to work with him, with the council, on making sure that the guidelines are pure and straight.

LARRY KING: So you are giving this a thumbs up?

MOORE: I am.

KING: Christopher Reeve on the phone. I know you have shared with Mary And appeared with her on occasion discussing this. What is your thought?

CHRISTOPHER REEVE, ACTOR: A little bit more mixed, Larry. I feel that nobody really knew that there were 60 stem cells available. And I don’t know that these lines have been examined to know how well they would work or what condition they are in. And I think that that is something that should have been done.

However, I think it is a step in the right direction. I’m grateful for that to the president.

I remember the speech clearly - and I remember being really proud of the way the president walked a moral tightrope and kept his balance; you can link to the video here. Man, he’s aged. It is hard to consent to being the most hated man in the world for nearly a decade. As I’ve said elsewhere, when you make yourself an offering to God and others, you can expect to be used and used up.

It’s going to take a long time for all the good things Bush has done to be recognized - it may take generations. And those of you - and I’m talking to you folk on the hard right who have decided that because Bush is not “perfectly in line” with you, he cannot have been a good and effective president, those of you who have forgotten the “good” you have received and will thus be unlikely to receive another - will miss this guy when he’s out of office. That’s all I have to say about that.

On the Embryonic Stem Cell controversy, Charles Krauthammer sums it up:

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”– James A. Thomson

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.

Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.

Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, as Thomson puts it, Bush was made “a little bit uncomfortable” by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.

In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a “moral ayatollah,” as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.
[…]
History will look at Bush’s 2001 speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end up.

Bush finally ended up doing nothing to hamper private research into embryonic stem cells and pledging federal monies to support the study of existing stem cell lines — but refusing federal monies for research on stem cell lines produced by newly destroyed embryos.
[…]
That Holy Grail has now been achieved. Largely because of the genius of Thomson and Yamanaka. And also because of the astonishing good fortune that nature requires only four injected genes to turn an ordinary adult skin cell into a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver.

But for one more reason as well. Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt — and that George Bush forced the country to confront — helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.

Please read all of Dr. Krauthammer’s piece, and then avail yourself of the 2001 speech which, in the wake of 9/11 a bare month later, pretty much everyone has forgotten. Hysteria, distortion, name-calling, paranoid (and false) “chill winds” aside, this president has gotten more right than wrong, and he deserves to be recognized for it.

Embryonic Stem Cells, it must be remembered produced nightmarish results in the lab, and never had a successful application.