More language smithing from Michael J. Fox and company

Some excerpts from the Michael J. Fox interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulos regarding embryonic stem cell research and my thoughts below.

Stephanopoulos: In the ad now running in Missouri, Jim Caviezel speaks in Aramaic. It means, "You betray me with a kiss." And his position, his point, is that actually even though down in Missouri they say the initiative is against cloning, it's actually going to allow human cloning.

Fox: Well, I don't think that's true. You know, I campaigned for Claire McCaskill. And so I have to qualify it by saying I'm not qualified to speak on the page-to-page content of the initiative. Although, I am quite sure that I'll agree with it in spirit, I don't know, I— On full disclosure, I haven't read it, and that's why I didn't put myself up for it distinctly.

I think this shows how little Fox actually knows about what's going on. He made his bed with these pro-embryonic stem cell groups and organizations a long time ago and I'm guessing they are the ones who provide him with all the information he gets on this issue. How can you say you support something in spirit without even reading it? Only if you trust the people and the groups behind it unconditionally.

In fact, they just did some work where they found that it actually relieved the symptoms of Parkinson's in one test, but there some residue, some tissue residue that built up, which is not ideal.

"Some tissue residue?" Is that what proponents of embryonic stem cell research are calling "multiple tumors" nowadays? Also no mention of what kind of animals these experiments were performed on. I'm guessing some people who aren't up on this issue would think Fox is describing research on human beings and not research on rats.

Stephanopoulos: What's the best evidence that you've seen recently of the promise of stem cell research?

Fox: Well, like I said, the fact that they can, that they can halt the symptoms of Parkinson's relative to us, again, with, you know, again, with, with flaws and with things that don't make it translatable at this point.

Again, no mention that Fox is probably talking about experiments on rats. Or if he's talking about humans, he's not mentioning that it was adult stem cell research which halted the symptoms.