Well, here we go again, another episode of neocons conning the theocons:

The Democratic-led U.S. Senate voted on Wednesday to lift a key restriction by President George W. Bush on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. ... Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chief sponsor of the bill, urged Bush "to reconsider his threat to veto it. There are some 400,000 leftover, unwanted embryos in fertility clinics across America," Harkin said. "All we are saying is, instead of throwing those leftover embryos away, let's allow couples to donate a few of them, if they wish, to create stem cell lines that could cure diseases and save lives."

New Embryonic Stem Cell lines are made from material stored at fertility clinics which is already slated for destruction. Preventing these cells from being used for research won't 'save' them. It simply means they'll be disposed of in a medical waste facility instead of being used to find cures for disease. The only reason to ban federal funding is to appeal to a minority of extremist social conservatives and it comes at the cost of possibly delaying or denying treatment--and in some cases perhaps life itself--to millions of people.

To the left we see the friendly neighborhood IVF Clinic which produces unused blastocysts (Diagram courtesy of Karen Wehrstein). Of the many thousands that are discarded each year, a handful could be saved and used to make Embryonic Stem Cell Cultures. A misinformed minority of voters led by a few politicians and a deeply unpopular President refer to the fiery end as "saving children," and the petrii dish as "murder." It would be funny, if the rest of us weren't forced to humor their glaring, discordant fabrication1.

Right about now is when the obligatory dig at the Neo-GOP is inserted, perhaps placed in an all too familiar list of failures, maybe with a concluding and slightly gleeful observation that at least they're systematically destroying themselves. But that conclusion is little consolation. A once decent mainstream political party has been hijacked by a small band of fringe kooks, incompetent crooks, and predatory clerics. This cabal of mendacity has ripped off the poor, the sick, the middle class, and even the unborn to give to the super rich. They have left a trail of broken lives, broken dreams, abandoned neighborhoods, maimed bodies, and corpses from Baghdad to the Gulf Coast. In the process they have driven that party over a cliff with the entire nation in tow. We will all be stuck cleaning up the wreckage left in their wake long after this ugly chapter in American history has drawn to an official close. That's nothing to celebrate.

In light of Iraq, Purgegate, or Katrina, Stem Cells may seem like small potatoes. But they’re an ideal window into the seamy duplicity dominating today's perverse remnant of the Grand Old Party. Through that lens the priorities of the ruthless ideological operatives pulling the strings of a puppeteer President are starkly revealed: fiction over truth, self over party, party over country, women and children last, money and power for a fleeting moment above all. And, given that this research holds promise to treat virtually every major cause of death in the US, in the end it may turn out that holding up ESCR killed more Americans than all other White House sins combined.