BUSY DAY

TONY SNOW


More catchup on my part, this time focusing on a very busy Tony Snow. Let's see, John Kerry (who is running for no elected office this year) apparently said something that offended people. Tony Snow used the White House press room as his bully pulpit to chastise Kerry and demand an apology. Except Kerry apologized hours before. Nice research, Tony. Either that, or you're trying to continue to beat a horse that Kerry smartly shot already. See, that's how most controversies go away, by having the offending party issue an apology - not a qualified one with "ifs" sprinkled throughout, just a mea culpa. It deflates the enemy. It's a lesson that the GOP hasn't embraced yet.
Next up, Snow recently attempted to pass his boss off as a pioneer in the world of stem cell research. Snow's three claims include:

1. “Any stem cell research that takes place in the United States today is a result of a decision the president made in 2001.”
2. “No president who has stepped up and made possible more research and encouraged more research than George W. Bush.”
3. Snow, added that “adult and blood cord stem cells” have “demonstrated far more promise” than embryonic stem cells.

Nice try, dingleberry, but the facts speak for themselves (via Think Progress):

1. Bush’s decision did not begin embryonic stem cell research in the U.S. Embryonic stem cell research funded by the Geron Corporation began in the late 1990s at the University of Wisconson and Johns Hopkins University. [Congressional Research Service, pg. 3]

2. President Clinton proposed broader federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Bush suspended the Clinton rules and replaced them with his own that restrict federal funding to lines derived prior to August 2001. Clinton did not propose federal funding for embryonic stem cell research earlier because it didn’t exist. [Congressional Research Service, pgs. 5-6]

3. Adult and umbilical cord stem cells do not show “more promise” than embryonic stem cells. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine called the White House source for this claim “patently false” and “pure hokum.” [9/21/06]

And finally, Snow again attempts to paint Bush as a trailblazer, this time in the field of climate change. Again, from the fine folks at Think Progress:

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow stated that “contrary to stereotype,” President Bush has been “actively engaged in trying to fight climate change.” He also took issue with a reporter’s comment that the United States has been absent from a global emissions and cap trade program, arguing that the Bush administration has “actually taken the lead on those kinds of innovations.”

President Bush has taken very little real action to fight climate change and even refuses to admit that it is manmade. He broke his promise to cap carbon emissions and insists that global warming can be fought through individual “voluntary” programs.

Despite being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States has refused to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement that assigns mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2004, emissions of all industrialized countries decreased by 3.3 percent, but in U.S. emissions grew by almost 16 percent in that same period and now accounts for
approximately two-fifths of the industrialized world’s greenhouse gases.

I tell ya, it's like we're living in opposite world, where Bush does one thing, then takes credit for the exact opposite. His very first (and only) presidential veto banned federal funding for stem cell research, but his mouthpiece claims Bush to be the one true vanguard for stem cell research. Bush refuses to participate in the Kyoto Protocol knowing it might potentially hurt some of his biggest contributors in the oil industry, yet now he's a champion of the environment. He was against the 9/11 Commission but then played it up as if he was 100% behind it from the start. These are strange times we live in.