Posted on 11/28/2005 7:29:20 AM PST by ncountylee
President Bartlett despaired over his political predicament and the mere platitudes his aides were telling him he had no choice but to emphasize in his State of the Union address.
He happened to have dinner with doctor friends of his wife, a doctor herself. He was excited to hear them talk about the viable prospect of cancer cures. He assembled his speech writers and told them to plug in a section whereby he'd call for a Kennedy-to-the-moon goal to cure cancer in a decade. Let's simply take a look at it, he said.
He would remove it, of course. It was entirely too ambitious and costly. Having only recently been caught lying to the people about his own chronic illness, he was in no position to take chances. His speech would remain timid and trite. He simply wanted to fantasize about eloquence and the can-do spirit and nobler, grander ideals - things all presidents surely intend in the beginning, before their Vietnams and Watergates and sex scandals and misbegotten invasions.
That's all fiction, of course. It's from a television show, "West Wing." But it's timely and poignant. I was reminded of it as I learned more about this idea to create a cabinet-level agency called the American Center for Cures.
I had been timelier than I knew in a column last week about new ideas from the Democrats, one of which has percolated from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. It is to create this national cure center, apart from the National Institutes of Health, to coordinate, concentrate, intensify and better finance our scientific and medical efforts to find cures for our most tragic and costliest killer plagues, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and cancer.
It is a mostly Democratic initiative, which, sadly, could be its downfall
(Excerpt) Read more at arkansasnews.com ...
Policy ideas from West Wing. The democrats look for new ideas anywhere.
I thought the episode was pretty good, and it was an interesting thought. We certainly haven't had any Presidents come out and challenge the public to something lately, have we? Maybe something like this would stimulate our hearts and minds to do something big.
Maybe we should ask the next Presidential candidates if they actually have a vision for America. The last one to have any true vision was Reagan.
It has been brought to our attention that Bad Things Happen to Good People. It will take a whopping big tax hike, but we aim to fix this problem so that Bad Things stop happening.
We're doing this for the children, and we're confident that only neanderthal bible-thumping rich white people will be dumb enough to point out how stupid our plan is.
C'mon kids! Let's play White House! Yeaaaa!
Have you just beamed down from the mother ship? You don't think this presidents talk of seeing the WOT through, including the emerging democracy in Iraq is a challenge? The lib media has been trashing the effort 7/24/365 and our brave soldiers along with it. This battle is far more important then any we have fought in our nations history and this president has set the course of action and repeatedly tried to explain it's importance and encourage us to see it through.
The only thing more laughable, inane and annoying is when a liberal extensively uses movie or fiction/fantasy book analogies to explain reality.
One, maybe two are okay to get a point. But when a whole issue is buttressed by nothing else...it makes you suspect there are no lights on upstairs.
Leaving aside the fact that the Dims seem to have appointed Aaron Sorkin as their idea man, the "idea" itself sounds to me like nothing more than another attempt to repackage and sell embryonic stem cell research.
It always makes me think of Gilligan's Island. I think both Gilligan and Ginger had a tendency to say "I [was in/saw] a movie once, where people dressed up as monkeys and fooled the prison guards into thinking that the inmates had escaped from the asylum, and ..."
While we're in the business of wishing, how about we buy every little girl a pony of her own right after we fund the Earthquake Prevention Agency and the Weather Machine Project?
This will be as successful in helping cures as the Drug Czar is in stopping Drugs.
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