The medicine men of old were quacks who exercised disturbing
influence over their patients by claiming to possess great healing
powers. The Democrats are inheritors of this tradition of
charlantry. They are not the party of medicine but of medicine men.
They are not the party of science but of scientific mumbo-jumbo.
They use bogus science and its omnipotent claims to seduce the
public. The medicine-man party found its voice in John Edwards last
year when he declared that Christopher Reeve would have been
walking were a Democrat in the White House.
The medicine men of old, fearing exposure as frauds and loss of
power, never wanted their enthralled patients to encounter real
doctors. Here too the Democrats resemble medicine men: As they
sucker the public with pseudo-science, they conceal from them real
science that cuts against their ideology and reveals their exercise
of power in the name of science as corrupt.
Look at how quickly the Democrats turn skepticism about science
on and off, depending on their ideological needs. When speaking of
the grand medical promise of experimentation on the stem cells of
destroyed human embryos, they show no skepticism about science
whatsoever and make fantastical claims about its power. But when
scientists report the dangers of RU-486, the Democrats suddenly
assume the posture of skepticism and show a resistance to science’s
niggling claims. Like shamans shooing away missionary doctors, the
Democrats tell the American public to close their ears and keep
taking their liberal medicine — contraceptives that fail,
abortifacients that can poison them, and so forth.
Last week, as the Democrats were castigating the Bush
administration for choosing “ideology over science,” the FDA
reported that two more victims, dead from RU-486, had been
sacrificed on the altar of a Democratic abortion ideology that
ignores science whenever it proves inconvenient.
“Federal health investigators are baffled: Why have four
California women died from a bloodstream infection after using a
controversial abortion pill?” reported the Associated
Press. Scientists who saw the dangers of RU-486 aren’t
baffled. They predicted these tragedies, and Hillary Clinton told
them to quiet down. Rebuking the Bush administration for not
approving over-the-counter abortifacients more quickly, she said,
“What we are witnessing is the FDA…being run not on the basis of
science, but on ideology” — an exact description of her own
ideologically driven impatience with any scientific study that
would keep those drugs off the market.
Eric Shaff, chair of the National Abortion Federation, has said
that RU-486 is less dangerous than aspirin. If a tobacco executive
made such a scientific claim to teenagers, Henry Waxman and Hillary
Clinton would be furiously holding hearings. But the Democrats
treat RU-486 with no such “scientific” concern. Not wanting to
discourage women from using abortion pills, they pooh-pooh credible
reports on its dangers. Just recently a Brown University scientist,
Ralph Miech, argued that RU-486 makes women more susceptible to
septic shock by eroding their immune system. Will the science in
his report get a hearing? Not by the Democrats.
All but one of the deaths so far from RU-486 have been due to
septic shock. “On the surface, this appears unusual,” Dr. Marc
Fischer, a medical epidemiologist at the federal centers for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, told the Associated
Press. A surprise? This was predicted, but Hillary Clinton and
the Democrats didn’t want to hear these warnings, just as they
don’t want to hear from scientists who note the risks of
contraceptives lest they give credibility to studies that might
impede the widespread use of contraceptives by teens.
The witch doctors and medicine men of modern times, like their
predecessors, are responsible for much blood-letting. One of their
victims is Holly Patterson, who as a California teen had heard the
propaganda from the Hillary Clintons that RU-486 is no more
dangerous than aspirin. After Patterson died from RU-486, her
father Monty took up the cause of outlawing the drug. “This drug is
not safe,” he has said to the press. “Holly never thought she would
take a drug that would kill her. She wouldn’t have done it.”
A party that tells the Christopher Reeves that they will walk
and the Holly Pattersons that they won’t die is not a friend of
science but a foe that will only turn to it for exploitation.
