By Scott Wright

Better stop reading right now, Foxaholics. If the reality of the world we've lived in for the past six years can't convince you there's a softball-sized mass of malleable goo where George W. Bush's brain should be, there's absolutely nothing I can write in 1,400 words that will flush out the taste of the Kool-Aid Sean Hannity's been serving you.

Dense as he is, the president surely knows what a horrible overall job he's doing. Last weekend, the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr., told CBS News that the Bush administration has been, basically, a total failure. Buckley said the current commander-in-chief suffers from an “absence of effective conservative ideology,” and implied that Bush 43 will surely never have his likeness grace a federal monument.

“There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush,” Buckley said matter-of-factly. “His legacy is indecipherable.”

Maybe, at some point in the distant future, someone will see fit to name a stem-cell clinic after George W. Bush, instead. That would certainly be ironic, since the president set scientific research back by at least a decade earlier this month when issued the first veto of his presidency, killing a bill the nation's scientific community, a majority of the United States Congress, and 74 percent of the American people solidly support.

Buckley has already told us the president is a fraud on his conservative claims. A little scrutiny quickly makes it quite apparent the moral, “pro-life” high ground the president claimed he stooped down from two weeks ago to veto HR 810 is actually a pile of ballot boxes. Put simply, Bush vetoed the embryonic stem-cell research bill to try and shore up his party's voting base in the months before the fall election.

Alabama's own Gary Palmer, head of the Bush-loving Alabama Policy Institute, argued in a column last week that Bush's veto won him the respect of the people of the nation regardless of their own personal stance on stem-cell research, because Americans “respect the president's deeply-held moral convictions.” Palmer added: “More than likely, there is a deep-down sense that President Bush is right.”

More likely than that, there's a deep-down sense that President Bush is unable to read or even comprehend anything more complex than "My Pet Goat," Mr. Palmer. I started to wonder about your literacy level, too, after I read another paragraph in your column: “While some polls show that most Americans may not agree with the president's decision to veto HR 810, these polls also indicate that most Americans have some reservations about the federal government spending to fund the destruction of human embryos.”

Actually, Mr. Palmer, according to a Rasmussen poll dated July 25, only 26 percent of voting age Americans expressed any such reservation. Yet it seems those far-right voters are so vitally important to Bush that he's willing to thwart scientific research in order to keep them, come November. In the meantime advances in the treatments for a wide variety of diseases, including diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injuries will lag farther and farther behind. And people will suffer and die who needn't have.

Obviously, our “pro-life” president doesn't care about so much about life, after all. Nancy Reagan begged him to care, to allow the bipartisan bill to pass. Bush said no. Republican supporters of the bill tried to hustle over to his office and talk him out of the veto, but he wouldn't even let them in the door. Sen. Tom Harkin* faxed the president a petition containing thousands of signatures asking the president to look past his narrow, ideologically extreme view of the world and allow science to commence efforts that may someday improve and/or save thousands, if not millions, of lives. Bush wadded up that petition and tossed it in the trash. He did all this in the hope he won't lose his Republican majority in Congress this fall and be forced to spend the last two years of his administration explaining to investigators why he's spent the first six wiping his feet on the U.S. Constitution.

Our own congressman for Alabama Dist. 3, Rep. Mike Rogers, voted to uphold the president's veto. Rogers will tell you he supports research on existing stem cell lines and adult stem cells, but what he won't tell you is he's got a lot to learn about this topic if he thinks those two sources are a substitute for new embryonic stem cells.

“There's no such thing in science as embryonic versus adult stem-cell research,” Dr. Thomas Zwaka, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told the Houston Chronicle for a story that ran on July 19. “We don't see either one as superior. They both have advantages.” As for the pre-existing lines of stem cells that Bush tacitly supported funding for back in August 2001, most have since been found to be either unworkable or irrelevant to cures for humans.

It's a lie to try and tell the American people that embryonic stem cells aren't needed, or that adult cells will work in their place. Scientists told the Chronicle that only nine diseases have so far responded to adult stem cells, not the 60-plus that some conservatives claim. Also, adult stem cells cannot morph into any other type of cell, like an embryonic stem cell can. In other words, adult stem cells will probably never be able to repair a paralyzed person's severed spine, a feat that has already taken place with embryonic stem cells using mice in a laboratory.

Someday, scientists claim, it may be possible to generate embryonic stem cells from adult stem cells. Unfortunately, researchers won't know until they can conduct tests on embryonic stem cells to determine exactly how they might go about growing them. But George W. Bush, Mike Rogers and a scant few others don't like that idea.

Surely, Rogers and the other representatives who upheld the president's veto simply forgot to do their science homework, because if they had I cannot imagine they could look a paralyzed friend or family member in the eyes and say, “I'm sorry, but all those Nobel laureates, every director at the National Institute of Health, and a great majority of the American people are all wrong.”

Watch out for some of the other lies you'll get from conservatives on embryonic stem cells. One of their favorite phrases is “destruction of human embryos.” That's one deception Bush and Palmer have already tossed around in defense of the veto. Doesn't hold water with anyone who knows anything about this issue, though, because the alternative fate for the embryos that would otherwise be used for stem-cell research is exactly that -- destruction.

When Bush announced he'd vetoed HR 810 at the White House, several families with “snowflake babies” -- children born from “adopted” embryos left over from in vitro fertilization treatments -- were in attendance at the ceremony. Bush recognized their presence as if his veto was their savior, as if without his veto those babies would never have been born. But what Bush and his ilk fail to mention is that HR 810 wouldn't have altered the process of adopting embryos. Rather, it would have allowed the owners of the 400,000 other embryos that no one wants to adopt to OK their use for scientific research rather than see them carted off and tossed into a medical incinerator.

In his column, Palmer wrote that Bush's decision was about courage. I say the veto was the product of either politics or ignorance, or possibly both. Certainly, on an issue like this we cannot expect everyone in the country to agree; some people will have moral objections. But the scientists agree, a majority of our elected lawmakers are on the same page, and over 70 percent of the American people insist it's OK to use a tiny bundle of cells that would otherwise be discarded to try and improve the quality of life for the sick and dying among us.

Ultimately, Mr. Palmer's argument in support of the president's position on embryonic stem-cell research falls flat. It doesn't take any courage to block this path of potential scientific advancement, only an absence of gray matter between the ears. George W. Bush's claim to be “pro-life,” followed by the veto of HR 810, rings as hollow as a tap on the metal tubing of a paraplegic's wheelchair.

Someday soon, the president's veto will be overturned by men who are wiser and less politically paralyzed than the group who represent us in Washington today. Until then, laboratories in the United States will continue to lose talented scientists to European countries, and thousands of people who need embryonic stem-cell research to help recover from their deadly afflictions will sit, wait and hope, while George W. Bush blindly leads this nation astray, once again.

(* Editor's Note: Harkin was incorrectly identified as a Republican in this week's print edition of The Post. A correction will be printed in the Aug. 7 edition. We regret the error).