James Taranto's Best of the Web offers this insight into John Edwards' ridiculous comment that people like Christopher Reeve will walk if Kerry/Edwards do their job right:

Columnist Charles Krauthammer is outraged by John Edwards's comment earlier this week that "if we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again":

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable. . . .

Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.

There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.

Krauthammer speaks with considerable authority here. He is trained as a physician, and he is also paralyzed, the result of an accident he suffered while a medical student.

DFO: Krauthammer's entire column is here.

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