Snake-oil salesmen

Who said the quality of our national political debate cannot descend any lower?

Vice presidential candidate John Edwards showed us Sunday that the snake-oil salesmen of the past have nothing on the John Kerry campaign in terms of hype, deceit and phony promises.

“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of their wheelchair and walk again,” he said in a campaign stop in Iowa.

How will John Kerry allow the paralyzed to walk again? How will he allow the deaf to hear and the blind to see? How will he perform these miracles?

Edwards used the tragic death of actor Christopher Reeve to make the boast because Kerry promises to spend more federal dollars promoting embryonic stem cell research – highly questionable research both from a pragmatic standpoint as well as an ethical one.

Worse yet, this was not an impromptu gaffe by Edwards. A Kerry spokesman, questioned later on the claim, agreed the only thing standing in the way of miraculous cures for people like Reeve is Bush’s obstinacy against experimentation on human embryos.

“That’s what the scientists tell us – that we’re not that far away from breakthroughs,” said Kerry spokesman David Wade.

In fact, what the Kerry campaign wants to do is set up an industry that will begin producing human embryos specifically for the purpose of scientific experimentation – something that would make Dr. Josef Mengele proud.

The Bush administration has already authorized federal funding for embryonic stem-cell lines already in existence. Bush barred the use of public funds to create new lines because it would mean killing human embryos.

Kerry, a man who has great compassion for “endangered species,” has pledged to lift those protections for innocent human life.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a medical doctor, called Edwards’ remarks “cruel,” “crass” and “opportunistic.”

“I find it opportunistic to use the death of someone like Christopher Reeve – I think it is shameful – in order to mislead the American people,” said Frist. “We should be offering people hope, just like physicians do; but neither physicians, scientists, public servants or trial lawyers like John Edwards should be offering hype … It’s giving false hope to people.”

While many scientists see stem cells holding out hope for potential cures for a host of diseases, none has claimed, as Edwards did, that paralyzed people would be walking again in a few years because of stem-cell research.

Is there anything these guys will not say or do to achieve political victory? Is there any depth to which they will not plummet to score a few cheap political points?

The answer is “no.”

Let’s remember the background of John Edwards – a trial lawyer who misled juries with phony scientific reports to build his own personal fortune and bankrupt doctors and hospitals in the process. He’s a man who decries rising health-care costs, but makes his living driving them up. He’s an ambulance-chasing legal predator who operates only within his own warped sense of morality, discarding thousands of years of religious and medical tradition that says: “First, do no harm.”

Will this kind of political pandering work?

Will the American people be fooled by the promises of miracles if only John Kerry is in the White House?

Or will this disgraceful, over-the-top, fake, phony, fraudulent peddling of miracle cures backfire?