JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

When it comes to ranking presidential weeks for bad performance in the modern era, you'd start, of course, with George W. Bush's during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina.

Then we probably would have to come in with Bill Clinton's on the occasion of it becoming public that he'd been cavorting sexually with the intern. Technically, the bad performance already had occurred. While it was infinitely more personally humiliating than George W.'s, fewer people drowned.

In third place, we might rank any of the scores of weeks since George W. invaded Iraq and people got blown up for reasons we might agree to describe as not universally clear or compelling.

It now appears that George W.'s week just ended might deserve insertion between two and three.

It contained all the recurring tragedies of third place. But it was enhanced by our president's decidedly unpresidential behavior at the G-8 summit, after which he came home to pose -- and that's exactly the word I was seeking -- as one possessed of sufficient depth and command to act on supposed moral grounds to block federal funding for the latest and most hopeful medical research.

The power lay in the irony. At the G-8 summit, Bush grabbed the West German chancellor's neck to give her an apparently unexpected rub. Men get sued for that in the workplace. Then he got overheard telling Tony Blair correctly if altogether simplistically and crudely -- and while chewing -- that the answer to the Israeli-Lebanon crisis was to get Syria to get Hezbollah to "stop doing this (expletive or excrement deleted)."

You don't say?

Then he came straight home from that to presume to stop medical science. He did so, he said, to protect the sanctity of human life. But that was of a discarded embryo, not a diseased human being.

We're talking about stem cells taken from extra human embryos created for the process known as in vitro fertilization, and we're talking about spending money to research the hopeful prospect that they can divide and differentiate and, in so doing, offer new treatments or even cures for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or spinal cord injuries.

These embryos have never been inside a mother. Many are in storage where they await -- well, getting thrown away now, most likely.

And that's supposedly better than using them to research for cures to extend human life, at least to Bush and the extreme religious conservatives to whom he panders.

Here's the simple choice:

Spend federal money to underwrite scientists in studying whether and how to use stem cells from discarded human embryos to revive human tissue and human organs.

Or go along with religious extremists who say these embryos and their cells represent human life and must not be used otherwise, except maybe to throw them away for lack of federal funding.

It's not a hard choice, and, for once Washington showed bipartisanship. Nineteen Republicans, including the good doctor, Bill Frist, veered from the extremist reservation to join all Democrats but one in providing 63 sane votes for federal funding.

Sixty-three votes are not quite enough to override a presidential veto. In other words, George W. Bush single-handedly stands in the laboratory door.

That's the way it goes. The president has that power. But a president presuming to exercise such power needs to show himself to be serious, informed and contemplative. Unfortunately, this man presuming to stand in the laboratory door had only days before behaved as a cross between a kid and a clown.

Bad timing. Bad week. I meant for the president, but you might also say for sick people.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.