Yeah, ok, I listen to Howard Stern. He's a good interviewer, and his crew is a hoot. But his politics, his politics are amazing. All it took was the FCC denting narcissist boy's style once to turn Howard from a flag-waving conservative to an unrepentant Democrat.

One of his favorite points is stem cell research. He harps on it so often I have to believe either he or someone very close to him has been diagnosed with some sort of degenerate neurological disorder. There's not a time he mentions Bush that he doesn't mention the stem cell research "ban".

The Democratic ticket isn't half as smart as Howard, which of course means they harp on it twice as much. This lead to a strange concordance as Howard tried to defend John Edwards's latest classic trial-lawyer misdirection by calling it a "misquote".

Well, Charles Krauthammer, who is himself a victim of spinal cord injury, dissects this example of Mr. Edwards's electorate fellatio with expert skill, and Krauthammer uses the whole quote:

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "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 walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
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Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.
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Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly ... that "people need a fairy tale." Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly exploiting this fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters that stem cells play well politically for them.
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There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.

I'm used to politicians lying to me. It's what they do. It's what they all do. I'm just looking for a set that'll at least try to stay out of the way and when they can do what's right. My God, people... you're trying to elect an Eastern technocrat and a freaking trial lawyer.

In 35 AD Rome was done with Tiberius, and he with them. He tried to replace a charismatic and immensely popular leader by doing what he thought was the right thing, sticking to his principles regardless what his chattering classes and elites clucked about. He dined on ashes for his trouble, eventually retiring to Capri to prepare his own successor. "Anyone will be better than Tiberius!" was a cry often written in the histories that survive, "absolutely anyone! Anyone but Tiberius!"

At least they had the excuse that Tiberius himself reared their viper.