When the polls had Kerry ahead right after the Democratic Convention, I told you in WhitakerOnline that I didn’t think Kerry stood a chance of beating Bush. My reason is simply that I know too much about inside politics to think that Clinton will let him win.

I am usually right about politics, or I couldn’t have made a living at it.

I don’t see any important difference between Kerry and Bush, so I tend to prefer Bush because he has the right enemies.

But in the debates one issue comes up that is critically important to me: stem-cell research. I cannot vote for anyone who opposes EMBRYONIC stem-cell research because it puts an abstract theological concept up against human beings.

I like Pat Buchanan personally. I like his belated defense of the survival of the white race. But in his best-selling book on that subject, he lamely concluded that the way the white race might survive is by getting religion.

Pat retains his respectability because, when any issue gets hot, he can be relied on to retreat into being an irrelevant nutcase theologue.

My wild-eyed support of Buchanan collapsed in the election when he announced that he didn’t believe in evolution because he didn’t want to be descended from a monkey.

There are lots of reasons to question evolution, but no grown man says something like that, much less a man who could be president.

In 1800 when every preacher in London opposed vaccination because the Bible says the body is the temple of the soul and cow germs should not be introduced into it, they may well have been been perfectly right theologically. They were NOT right according to the Golden Rule, which overrules theology.

Instead of saving unborn babies, an area in which I have a lot of REAL accomplishments, the “Pro-Life” movement has abandoned the field. If those who value theocratic theory over human life had won, the exceptions for rape and incest would have been removed from legislation.

There is one little problem with that great theocratic victory: all that legislation would have been defeated. That is why my pro-life boss kept putting it back in.

No one in the purely theocratic wing of the Pro-Life Movement was the least bit worried about the millions of actual babies who would have been aborted if that legislation had been defeated. I talked to them. They wanted to win a theoretical victory, kids be damned.

I would like to be with the rest of you on these issues, but I have just been too close to the real thing.

When someone talks about the leftist National Council of Churches, I saw and SMELLED the death of whole villages they helped cause by their “humanitarian” support of Communist terrorists.

When someone gives me the theory and the Word of the Lord on legislation, I remember those self-styled Pro-Lifers who cared nothing for real unborn children. The kind of Pro-Lifers who are shouting about stem-cell research today have that same kind of mentality.

I remember when that type of Pro-Lifer was fighting to ban in vitro fertilization, because several embryos have to be created and die for each human being who lives.

They, too, argued that not one child had yet been born from in vitro, just as those opposing embryonic stem-cell research say no one has been cured by it yet.

When they shouted that several embryos had to die for each child, I also remembered that for every human being who has been on this earth, several fertilized embryos had to die in the natural process of human reproduction.

There are well over 30,000 people alive today because we beat that ban on in vitro fertilization. The fact is that no one who opposes embryonic stem cell research today could wish those 30,000 people to be alive today.

It is the SAME argument. The Pro-Lifers have conveniently forgotten about their attempt to ban in vitro fertilization because if it were brought up today it would show what callous fools they were.

I know Bush will win, but on that issue alone I wish he would not.