Osama bin Laden and his top leadership — the people who murdered 3,000 Americans — have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.
I begin to understand: We should have invaded Pakistan instead of Iraq!
That would certainly have been a more interesting conflict. Pakistan’s army and air force are larger, better equipped and more professional than Saddam Hussein’s ever were, and we would have to reach the country either through amphibious assault or by making a deal for bases in India. Also, war with Pakistan would have satisfied the First Liberal Principle of War-making: minimal relationship to American national interests. We’ll leave to one side the question of how easy it would be to locate Osama in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier and serve an arrest warrant.
When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.
Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.
So the callousness of bigoted doctors in the pre-civil rights South (who in any case had no effective means of treating syphilis) is a reason to prohibit life-saving medical research today? I’d like to say something humorously dismissive, but, frankly, I’m appalled. Can we at least extract a promise from Senator Obama that, should he be elected President, this woman will be required to remain strictly silent about all matters of public policy for the next four (or eight) years?
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