Trump's Deadly Pander To Anti-Choice Extremists
"Who knows how many people will suffer horrible, soul-crushing illnesses because Trump and his base are insufferably clueless about this decision"
by Bob Cesca
The Supreme Court recently upheld part of an Indiana anti-choice law requiring clinics that provide abortion services to dispose of aborted embryos by cremation or by burying the remains. Doctors can also hand over the destroyed embryos to their abortion patients to dispose of as they choose, but the general idea is that a partially gestated human should be buried rather than tossed into the biohazard bin.
This was a major priority for Mike Pence, who signed the law back in 2016 just before being sworn in as Donald Trump’s vice president. What Pence and his new boss don’t realize is they’re ordering the burial or cremation of cells that could help cure Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, not to mention HIV, rabies, rubella, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), spinal cord injury, burns, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and a variety of as-of-now incurable disorders.
Likewise, we learned on Wednesday that possible Alzheimer’s sufferer Trump has decided to kill the federal funding for embryonic stem cell research by the National Institutes of Health and other government-operated research agencies. (Fred Trump, the president’s dad, suffered from Alzheimer’s for six long years.) Yes, welcome back to the George W. Bush administration and the abrupt end to government research into cures for literally dozens and dozens of diseases -- cures that will take much longer to discover using adult stem cells.
There’s literally no justification whatsoever for this decision other than as a flagrant and deadly pander to ignorant hoopleheads and religious zealots who don’t understand what’s at stake. Chiefly, they don’t appear to grasp the concept that aborted embryos in every state, including Indiana, are being buried, burned or tossed in dumpsters -- generally wasted rather than recycled for life-saving research. Not for nothing but the embryos held in storage by the NIH will likely be tossed out, too, since experimentation is off the table. In other words, Trump is making sure countless embryos will become garbage instead of a cure for something.
It’s impossible to fully comprehend why Trump would rather the NIH shit-can these embryonic remains than to use them for the greater good. And forgive me for being so blunt, but the research embryos are dead already. Cutting off the NIH’s funding isn’t bringing the embryos back to life, and Trump’s de-funding of these studies definitely isn’t going to curtail the abortion rate and therefore the availability of additional tissue samples every day.
One explanation could be that Trump is pandering to the idiots who believed the James-O’Keefe-inspired fake video in which Planned Parenthood was accused of putting embryonic remains up for bids on a sort-of abortion black market. Yes, Planned Parenthood provides remains to research clinics, public and private. Yes, they accept payment for those remains -- but the payments are exclusively to cover the cost of shipping the embryos, not as some sort of profit-making scheme.
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The videos turned out to be selectively edited to show something that isn’t actually happening. But that didn’t stop the Republicans from exploiting a proven fake video to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Hell, they completely destroyed ACORN because of another fake video, this time a fake video that was proven fake in court and by countless independent fact-checking organizations.
By the way, you might not have heard the rest of the story on those Planned Parenthood videos. The perpetrator of the videos, a guy named David Daleiden from the bogus “Center for Medical Progress,” was indicted as part of -- not a liberal investigation but a GOP-led investigation launched by anti-choice extremist Texas governor Greg Abbott. Daleiden was also indicted for attempting to illegally purchase fetal body parts, the very thing he was plotting to expose in the first place.
The Republican Party permanently grappled its reputation to those obvious fabrications in spite of the fact that the videos were almost immediately debunked as frauds by nonpartisan fact-checkers. Following suit, more than a dozen state-level investigations, mainly by red state Republican governors, completely exonerated Planned Parenthood from any wrongdoing including the false allegations in the videos. Yep. One of the two major political parties in this country has built its shoddy, unconstitutional, anti-woman platform on a superstructure of lies.
And now it looks like Trump has made his stupid, stupid NIH decision based on the same nonsense and chicanery. The lack of science and the lack of rationality here certainly reflects Trump’s penchant for cruel whimsy, while also acting to cover his own ass in the face of a crucial re-election battle where the stakes include whether he’ll be prosecuted upon losing the White House. Who knows how many Americans will die from the aforementioned diseases. Who knows how many people will suffer horrible, soul-crushing illnesses because Trump and his base are insufferably clueless about this decision -- a decision that, again, will not save any embryos from being aborted.
Frankly, all things being normal, Trump needs to issue an explanation to men and women suffering from illnesses that could be eliminated permanently by the NIH’s embryonic stem cell research. But he never, ever will. By the way, he also thinks he’s going to live forever. He won’t.
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How I Finally Learned To Handle My Trump Supporting Friend
"He accused me of an ad hominem attack, except I wasn’t attacking - just telling him the truth."
by Ben Cohen
I have a Trump supporting friend who contacts me intermittently to discuss politics. He takes a combative approach knowing full well I’ll take the bait and engage in kind. My friend usually begins our interactions via text with a diatribe about socialism in Venezuela, or a joke about identity politics……