Adopt a BlastoCyst; Call it "George", "Dick", or "Tom"!

I like Rude Pundit's take on Bush's phenomenally dumb speech the other day that single cell embryos were far more precious and deserved far more protection than any living, fully cooked human (fully cooked pretty much excludes George and the Twins, of course).

The Rude Pundit is not going to try to outline the science for you. You can find some great primers on stem cells out there. But let's just say this: if you believe that blastocysts created for in-vitro fertilization should be protected as if they were living, breathing, walking, talking, shitting, fucking beings, then you should offer up yourself or your wife or your mistress or your daughter to be constantly implanted with these cute lil' babies to make sure they're all adding to your voting base.

As with the Terri Schiavo debacle, the over-the-top rhetoric reached its pinnacle with Tom DeLay, who said during the debate on stem cell legislation in the House of Representatives, "An embryo is a person, a distinct, internally directed, self-integrating human organism. We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." And so was Hitler. And so was Saddam Hussein. And so was Tom DeLay. So the fuck what?

Doesn't it just hit you in the gut, like a sumo wrestler leaping on a wayward toddler, to hear George Bush say with a straight face and no sense of irony, "We should not use public money to support the further destruction of human life"? Bush tried so hard to not say that his crazed Christian beliefs were the reason why he threatens to veto the stem cell research bill. Instead, he used a tortured version of ethics, some fucked-up idea that it is more ethically sound to use leftover blastocysts for the occasional baby than for research that has the potential to help, well, every real and living person on earth. Somewhere, Benedict de Spinoza is screaming, "Are you fuckin' kiddin' me?"