Bad Analogies of the Day

William Saletan.

I take it that for most our audience the analogy between Obama repealing Bush's ban on stem-cell research (or, at least, defending this policy in terms Saletan does not approve of) and Dick Cheney's policy of arbitrary torture is so specious that to restate it is to refute it. But perhaps Saletan may wish to conisder one rather obvious difference: opponents of torture actually favor categorical bans on torture, whereas Bush and most of his supporters thought that stem-call research should be perfectly legal but that some forms of this research should be denied state funding. Or may he shouldn't consider it, such most of his writing on these issues ceding the moral high ground to people who don't even take their own purported ideas seriously.