Michael J. Fox admits Ignorance

Anyone with video capture may wish to post that admission at Youtube or elsewhere.

Yup, heard it...it'll be ignored by the rest of the LSM...

Found the transcript

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.

On full disclosure, I haven't read it, and that's why I didn't put myself up for it distinctly.

Uh ... what?

" I am quite sure that I'll agree with it in spirit ...that's why I didn't put myself up for it distinctly"

Huh??

RUSH WAS RIGHT AGAIN!!

Rush will never get the credit - but he's finally broken through the "infallable" spokesperson mystique.

Maybe next time Fox will take the time to read the legislation before he starts supporting it.

Another actor validating the assertion that

Actors are ignoramuses ! With a few notable GOP exceptions !

Maybe next time Fox will take the time to read the legislation before he starts supporting it.

Doubt it.It took me some time at FR to realize I better reread things twice before opening my big yap.87)

Outstanding.

Thanks.

Wow - this is huge.

He admits that he did an attack advertisement without familiarizing himself with the details. He also claims to be against cloning - but is he against the Missouri cloning initiative or for it?

I have to qualify it by saying I'm not qualified to speak on the page-to-page content of the initiative.

It's quite possible Fox was duped by McCaskill's "people."

Michael J. Fox: "I'm not qualified to speak on the page-to-page content of the initiative."

As long as he knows if he took his Meds or not, that is the important part.

Pray for W and The Election

I hope this is the last post about Michael J. Fox. He is a fool, but a nice fool who is very ill and has been used by some very nasty democRATs. He cannot influence the elections anymore.

He is just sick and dying and pitiful. I hope we let him be.

That's nice. I'm still holding out for his admission that he's the Anti-Elvis.

IOW, Michael Fox is just another Hollywood airhead. Whaddasupprise.

Maybe next time Fox will take the time to read the legislation before he starts supporting it.

Fox is in good company. I don't think anyone in Congress reads their bills either. Time after time we hear about some new law's unexpected provisions, and a bunch of Representatives and Senators start saying, "I voted for WHAT?"

This link sent to Drudge, just for fun....

Well .. if he doesn't learn anything from this fiasco .. it's his loss.

Transcript is here: http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/print?id=2613377

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.

But I've made this point before, and I really am sincere in it, that anybody who's prayed on this, and thought about it, and really considered it and can't get their mind around or their heart around the idea of embryonic stem cell research, I'd go to war for your right to believe that. And you're right to feel that. I respect it. I truly do.

My point is, and our point as a community, is we have a very good and supportable conclusion that a vast majority of people in this country are in favor of science playing a leading role in making changes in the future and believe in embryonic stem cell research.

So we're just saying, know that we have prayed on it, too, and we have thought about it, and we are good people, and we are family people, and we are people that take this very seriously, and we're as concerned as you are.

And we've decided that we would like to take this step and to do it with caution and to do it with oversight and to do it with the strictest adherence to ethics and all of the principles this country stands for.

But, allow us to do that without infusing the conversation with inflammatory rhetoric and name-calling and fear-mongering. It doesn't help.

Stephanopoulos: Do you think there's any way to finally find common ground with people who do believe in the end that this is tampering with tiny lives?

Fox: Well, again, the point has been made that these lives are going to be thrown away, anyway. They are marked for destruction -- thousands of frozen embryos that are a byproduct of in vitro fertilization. We have routinely, before this conversation started on stem-cell research, we have for years thrown them away.

And that's the other thing, you know, this idea of snowflake babies: We're in favor of that. The truth of the matter is that it is only going to account for a tiny fraction--

Stephanopoulos: Those are the embryos that are adopted and then brought--

Fox: Absolutely. Who would have a problem with that? That's fantastic.

But it will, in the end, account for only a tiny fraction of those eggs. And so our point is that the pro-life position is to use that -- what up to this point is waste, of literal waste that is going to be thrown away -- use it to save lives and to ensure lives for the future. I mean, they talk about unborn. Unborn kids are going to be born with diabetes. People are going to be dealing with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's or to Parkinson's or kids that are going to be injured, have spinal cord injury.

That those kids may be born into a world that has the answers for that. That's our position.

(BREAK FOR DIRECTION)

(INTERVIEW RESUMES)

Stephanopoulos: You were just saying you're about to hit a pocket.

Fox: Yeah, I just hit a nice pocket. I should be calm for a sec.

Stephanopoulos: Good.

Fox: It's kind of like surfing, you know. You wait for the wave. And I just hit a nice wave I think.

Stephanopoulos: Well, I don't want to rile you up, but I am going to bring up Rush Limbaugh one more time.

(LAUGHTER)

Fox: There it goes!

Stephanopoulos: One of the things he says is that when you're talking about all these cures, you're giving people false hope and that it's cruel.

Fox: It's so funny. What is crueler, to not have hope or to have hope? And it's not false hope. It's a very informed hope. I mean, it's hope that's informed by the opinion of our leading scientists, almost to the point of unanimity that embryonic stem cells, because they're pluripotent, because they have the capacity to be anything, and, are truly-- Will [it] be a straight path to victory? Probably not. Probably you'll have stutter steps along the way.

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. But two steps forward, one step forward, one step back, you know, it's a process, it's how this country was built. It's what we do, you know. It seems to me that in the last few years, eight, 10 years, we've just stopped, we've become incurious and un-ambitious. And hope, I mean, hope is-- I don't want to get too corny about it, but isn't that what the person in the harbor with the thing--? (Gestures)

It's about hope. And so to characterize hope as some sort of malady or some kind of flaw of character or national weakness is, to me, really counter to what this country is about.

Stephanopoulos: We first talked about this five years ago. And you did talk about the enormous promise.

Looking back five years later, some scientists do, it's been a disappointment.

Fox: Well, it's been a disappointment in that they haven't had a full deck to deal from.

I mean, we talked in 2001 and there, you know, there was talk of 60 lines. And even that really 60 lines out of potentially thousands of lines. We've been limited to 60.

I remember sharing with you with one point, whether on camera or not, that there would be less than that and it turned out to be less than that.

And then those lines turned out to be quite polluted in some cases with mouse cells.

And also now, now, it's like you're try to get a good picture out of a videotape that's been recorded on over the course of 10 years.

I mean, it's so, been through so many generations, it's just like using a first-issue Mac in today's computer world. You can't great results from that. We need to fully support these scientists and give them what they need.

And, again, set rigid ethical standards and have faith in them to follow the standards and to explore, with the best material they can have, answers that will take care of our citizenry.

We're talking about the greatest asset that we have, which is our people. And we're saying we're forsaking those people for the sake of these cells which are, as I said, going to be destroyed.

The moral high ground has been surrendered on that.

Stephanopoulos: Supporters of the President Bush say: Wait a second. He's the first president ever to have any funding.

Fox: He's the first one who had an opportunity to. I mean, this technology didn't-- He came in with it. It didn't precede him. No one had an opportunity before him.

Clinton didn't have an opportunity to vigorously pursue embryonic stem cell research because it wasn't there. It kind of co-arrived with the president. So he set the policy going forward with this new science.

And he immediately took the vision that he took, which was guarded support, if you could even characterize it as support, and so it's not surprising that we've had the progress that we've made, which has been limited.

Stephanopoulos: You clearly believe that President Bush has hindered the progress. Can you quantify it?

Fox: Well, I don't know. I wouldn't put it-- I don't know that he said, "Here's what I think about this; I don't like this; I'm going to hinder it."

I think that it was overly managed to the point of-- I mean, the outlook was immediately damage control and, you know, "Let's not have this be something that's going to make anybody upset," as opposed to embracing it as an opportunity.

So I don't want to characterize the president's motives or ambitions or thought process, but the outcome is obvious.

It hasn't been supported. It's been limited. I mean, the very fact that the stem cell line-- We started out with limitations -- not guidelines, limitations.

In fact, the guidelines, if I remember correctly, and I may be quoting a little out of school, but you'll might be able to look back and find it.

I think the scientific panels that were assembled at the time said that this isn't enough; this isn't aggressive enough. And then they were kind of shut down and that pattern has continued. You know, there hasn't been an embrace of science. Across the board, there hasn't been an embrace of science.

And again, I just go back to the fact that our scientists throughout the history of this country have made tremendous contributions and have proven themselves to be worthy of our support and respect.

Stephanopoulos: You're supporting it through your foundation. A lot of states are supporting it. What do you say to those who say, "You know, we don't need the federal government to get in the middle of this right now, and it's too divisive an issue?"

Fox: Well, the federal government has to be involved, because on one level, you talk about limitations; it's not just a matter of the stem cells being limited, but the restriction on federal funding. If you have an institution, a facility that can do this kind of work and it receives any federal funding at all, you lose that if you do, if you take a cell out of a Petri dish on government property. So you have to have duplication of facilities.

So now our resources are going into scientists having to duplicate federal facilities at enormous expense in order to do the most rudimentary work with stem cells, with embryonic stem cells. You have researchers that can't get funding. And so you have young researchers that are not going into the field. It's the iterations of limitation are endless.

So you say: Why can't the private sector get involved? Because they have to duplicate the entire resources of the federal government in order to do it. It's just not practical.

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.

But, it's-- No. In answer to those that say it's false hope, you know, we're not fooling ourselves. This is a course that's going to take some time and have some setbacks. But it's a positive, forward-looking attitude and approach with, again, assurances that this is the most optimistic and positive and promising recourse we can take.

Stephanopoulos: And your goal now is to go out and elect candidates who will, I guess, help override the president's veto.

Fox: Of any stripe. You know, that's the other notion that was put out there, was that I somehow was recruited by the Democratic Party.

Stephanopoulos: Democratic shill, I think was the word.

Fox: Democratic shill, yes. I have to look up shill in the dictionary. I think it has something to do with supporting someone whose beliefs you don't believe in for ulterior reason or something.

But, yeah, no, I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party. I approached them. I sat down to find out what candidates are pro-stem cell in races where they're opposed by anti-stem cell candidates. And I had no predisposition toward Democrats or Republicans. It'd be fine with me either way.

In fact, a Republican candidate who's pro-stem cell would be someone I'd really like to talk to. And in fact in the past I've supported, I've done commercials for Arlen Specter, who is a very aggressive pro-stem cell champion. And I know that there are others, you know. There are people like Orrin Hatch and Danforth and others who've thought about it, weighed it really carefully and found that its pro-life possibilities aren't counter to their previous positions. This is a pro-life position, and this is the responsibility of our leadership to take it down this path. It will help Americans.