The Choice Not Taken

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Maybe it comes of having someone near and dear to me living with chronic leukemia and never being quite certain what the next week, the next month, the next year may hold...

Three disparate news items have caught my eye lately. This article from the Minnesota Independent about the University of Minnesota's ground-breaking research trials using embryonic stem cells. The success rate against cancer tumors? 100%. Admittedly a small study. All the more reason to push for more, soonest. Because a comparable trial using umbilical cord cells produced only 38%.

Don't know about you, but 100% odds sound a lot more appealing for my loved one than 38%.

And then, over dinner, we listened to Richard Haass on Hardball, author of War of Necessity, War of Choice, A Memoir of Two Wars in Iraq. Distilling Haass, Dubya mis-led us into war in Iraq without ever hearing any contrary discussions, only that which supported his agenda. And that agenda could be summed up thusly: Afghanistan wasn't grand enough, we didn't put on a big enough show, we didn't get Osama bin Laden, so we shifted ground and went for the ol' Shock and Awe.

Bushie needed to prove...what, exactly? That he was a real man because he could deciderate to cause enough carnage and damage and destruction that the whole world—well, the whole Middle Eastern world—would bow down and shower us in rose petals and candy and dancing children and.... ?

There is something so consummately monstrous in the whole mindset that led us into Iraq that it's almost beyond comprehension. The arrested adolescent President who took on the trappings of a demi-god.

How Napoleonic. Complete with the costume..."mission accomplished."

What mission, though?

And at what price?

Just imagine, if George W. Bush, who had the moment, had cast himself on the side of the angels, pushed for embryonic stem cell research, for example. Instead of joining the demons in a lust for empire and dictatorial power and the torture tactics that sank him and his ilk to the same level as those he professed to...hmmmmm.... I don't have a problem with dictatorships, as long as I get to be dictator. Don't ever say he didn't warn us.

Maybe, if the man of the "gentlemanly C" (methinks the "gentleman" doth profess too much, that's grade inflation if I've ever seen it) had focused on building a better world instead of his destructive path, then we wouldn't have circumstances like those that took Andy Rounds.

Or at least we'd be closer to a cure.
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crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette