The Washington Post ran this piece today by Charles Krauthammer on Edwards claim "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize author and a doctor by training, is paralyzed and wheel-chair bound, so he knows of what he speaks.
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Krauthammer defuses the "Kerry will make them walk again" lies and finishes in his usual style: Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected
