Ramesh Ponnuru freezes Richard Cohen solid, then smacks him with a hammer:
He thinks that the president’s event with families who had adopted “unused” embryos and raised them as children was emotionally manipulative. I suppose we should go back to the sober, rational debate we were having with pictures of disease-stricken celebrities.
His only argument is a version of the naturalistic fallacy: A lot of human embryos die because they fail to implant, therefore they weren’t alive in the first place. In other words: because they die naturally, it’s okay for us to kill them deliberately. Because tsunamis happen, is it okay to slaughter Asians?
An excellent and concise dismissal. Wish I’d managed to put it that precisely myself.
And actually, I think political discourse via celebrity is a perfectly reasonable way to go about it in a culture where Michael Jackson and Paris Hilton are considered major news stories by the media and public alike.