In its review of President Obama’s expected reversal of the Bush Administration’s policy on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, the New York Times swerves into the truth, repudiating the mainstream media’s position on the Bush policy to date. The Times now says the following about the heretofore derided Bush stem cell policy:

“But in August 2001, in a careful compromise, President Bush opened the door a tiny crack, by ordering that tax dollars could be used for studies on a small number of lines, or colonies, of stem cells already extracted from embryos – so long as federal researchers did not do the extraction themselves.”

Of course, rational people have always known that Bush’s stem cells decision was carefully crafted and appropriately balanced on scientific and ethical grounds. But that is not the position the left media took during subsequent political campaigns.

When the goal was electing Democrats, the media dutifully portrayed the policy at best as arbitrary and ideological, and at worst as anti-science, unfeeling, and even harmful. Moderate Republicans that supported the policy, like former Missouri Senator Jim Talent, were tarred as radical and dangerous extremists, in league with those who would return America to the days before modern medicine – when diseases were thought to be caused by one’s sins, and cured by purification or forced conversion.

But now that Democrats are in control, the goal is somewhat different. Now the left-wing media wants to provide cover for President Obama’s radical expansion of federal funding for embryo-destroying research. In that context, Bush’s policy must be presented as a good thing. Obama is only opening up even more opportunity for cures building on the “careful compromise” of his predcessor.

In truth, the policy reversal exercised by the Obama Administration hasn’t the least bit to do with ethics or science. If it did, Obama would likely have only modified the Bush policy slightly. Today’s decision is about repaying the abortion industry, that’s right I said industry, for it’s support of the most radically pro-abortion president in history. The sad aspect to this is that the result of the Administration’s political payback will be further delays in finding cures for the myriad afflictions that stem cells are purported to be able to treat. This will be the natural result of scarce research dollars being pumped into investigating treatments that don’t work, embryonic stem cells, instead of those that have been proven to work, adult stem cells. And all facilitated by the Administration’s loyal minions in places like the New York Times.

Shame.