Michael Kinsley, writing in The Washington Post, observed in a Sept. 29 column that President Bush’s stance on the “right to life” is very capricious. Bush’s stance, like many religious conservatives, is that life begins at conception:

Even tiny embryos composed of a half-dozen microscopic cells, he thinks, have the same right to life as you and I do. That is why he cannot bring himself to allow federal funding for research on new lines of embryonic stem cells or even for other projects in labs where stem cell research is going on.

Even though the possibility exists that the destruction of these embryos could help extend the lives of already-born human beings, the moral dilemma for Bush is no dilemma at all. Even if there existed the possibility that destroying embryos could help people, the destruction of these embryos is so evil that nothing could justify said destruction.

Okay, fine. Makes sense. But what about Iraq? Kinsley presents us with an ethical conundrum. On the one hand, the president refuses to kill a “human” (in quotation marks because, while the president believes it, I do not) even though, in that death, more humans might be saved. But in Iraq, Bush does not refuse to stop killing humans, even though, in their death, more humans might be saved. Kinsley writes:

But it is hard -- indeed, I would say it is impossible -- to reconcile Bush's absolutism over allegedly human life when it is a clump of unknowing, unfeeling cells with his sophisticated, if not cavalier, attitude toward the loss of innocent human life when it is children and adults in Iraq. [...] And -- oh, yes -- there is still the question of whether a clump of a half-dozen cells you can't see without a microscope is actually a human being in the same sense as a 6-year-old girl blown up as she skips off to kindergarten in Baghdad.

While Kinsley proves what we’ve known all along -- namely, that President Bush is a hypocrite who doesn’t take a great many things into account when making decisions -- it is still interesting to examine what he is doing and consider that he is still in office.