Using Embryos Without Limit Is Line Too Far

by Charles Krauthammer - March 12th, 2009 - Investor's Business Daily

Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research.

I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.

I declined to attend. Once you show your face at these things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. My caution was vindicated.

[snip]

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values."

Unlike Dr. Krauthammer, I think of myself as a religious man. I am guided by a belief that the moral precepts that condition mankind came from other than selfish personal interest. We are guided by a higher power which makes us better, when we try. Being a Doctor and a Psychologist, I think that Dr. Krauthammer has more than a little appreciation for how complex is both the human body and the human mind. That suggests why he can express admiration for George Bush's position on embryonic stem cell research, even when it does not match his own. Bush clearly used his mind to attempt a serious treatment of the stem cell dilema.

Dr. Krauthammer's assessment of Barack Obama having "the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism" is exactly the same assessment I have of the man's opinion of himself. It is curious how two people coming from totally different directions could reach the same view of someone as complex as Obama.

However, though the above is how Obama likes to see himself, I do not think that Obama is honest in his own assessment of himself. I think like so many liberals, he actually does have a God. His God, like the God of most liberals, is political power. He may interpret it as pragmatism, however it is much more selfish than that. Obama worships power. That is why he seems so delighted with his current position. He is the most powerful person in the world and he can flaunt this power in any way he chooses. That may give Obama some reason to see the future with hope, but it should not give hope to anyone with a conscience.

I am intensely afraid of someone like Obama, not because he is immoral, but because he is an amoral narcissist. His thoughts and comments on the complex moral dilema of abortion and stem cell research are infantile, because he has not bothered to think about them. He accepts liberal dogma and spews it out as if it is intellectually serious just because he says it.