In Your Face Double-Speak

Calling it “Obama’s ‘Science’ Fiction“, Charles Krauthammer blasts Barack Obama’s self-congratulatory announcements on embryonic stem cell research and “science”. As always when Krauthammer takes a politician to the woodshed, it is unfailingly brutal.

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.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

 There is a lot more. Again, this demonstrates the in-your-face double-speak of Obama. He solemnly promises one thing while casually delivering the exact opposite. He preaches responsibility while signing massive, unsupportable spending bills. He poetically denounces wasteful spending while quietly approving pork-laden spending sprees. He promises change in Washington politics while sophomoric attacks on Rush Limbaugh are directed from the White House itself. He promises bipartisanship while ignoring and insulting Republicans in every initiative he announces.

This blatant double-speak cannot but have negative consequences for Obama in the long run. Flowery rhetoric can only carry one so far.