John Montgomery  Presents This Week's Creep Logo by Lynn Kauczka

The No-Clone Clowns I Gotta Be Mini-Me

I get real nervous when people in the government spend their time making decisions about what I can and can't do with my cells, be they sperm, stem or any other variety. And lately, that's all they seem to be doing. The Big Event of the week was Snippy's long awaited decision on whether to allow federal funding for stem cell research. As expected, he cut a deal in the end, coming up with a compromise that disappointed most, but pissed off only a few.

I knew we were in trouble right after the speech when Jerry Falwell popped up on the screen, shaking his jowls in triumph, God-blessing George W Bush and adding the inevitable Bill Clinton insult. Jerry, whose most recent crusade was saving the world from gay Teletubbies, is still trying to whip up sales of his $40 videotape proving that Bill is a drug-running, crack-smoking, trooper-murdering Satan clone.

(Minor digression: Have you noticed that Jerry seems to have gained all the weight that fellow gas bag Rush Limbaugh lost? These two guys, who make their substantial livings by poisoning the minds of the gullible, are obviously engaged in some form of mutual cell transference. Maybe we should spend some federal funds to research that.)

Anyway, when we're dealing with federal funding, it's the unfortunate fact of life that politicians will be making the decisions. So we'll let the boys have their fun with this one over the next few months and see how it plays out. More deals will be cut, more constituencies will be sucked up to, and more gas bags will flatulate.

The other screaming heard this week about what I'm allowed to do with my body parts concerns cloning. The US House of Representatives weighed in, banning all human cloning even for medical research, citing deformed babies and moral transgressions. The Senate is poised to do something similar, the President will sign and polling finds that most Americans agree with the ban.

But my genes may not have to die with me after all. Two foreign doctors and an American entrepreneur announced they are about to begin cloning humans. The trio says they have 200 infertile couples ready to begin experiments which will give the couples the chance to give birth to their own clones. This will all happen outside the United States and the American politicians can all go reproduce themselves, say the docs. One of them, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, a member of the Raelian religious sect, who is believed to be a nut case by many of her medical colleagues, says, "I think you should be able to do what you want with your own genes."

I'm with Brigitte. Nut case or not. If I want to clone myself, why should the government or anyone else have an opinion? Laws like the ones we're about to pass in this country will only send the mad scientists running to Transylvania or offshore boats in international waters. The cloning horse is out of the barn and it's gonna gallop away somewhere. We ought to make sure it's done right with some well thought out legislation rather than knee-jerk Frankenstein-monster-induced hysteria.

After all, look at how many clones we already have in the government. How much difference is there between Tom Delay and Dick Armey? Or between Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas? And you just know there was some genetic hanky panky going on to produce identical twins like Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic. I think we need some DNA testing here.

And after a few successes with cloning, just imagine the possibilities down the road. If they can duplicate one human being, why not combine the best features of several prime candidates into one really fine specimen? I've always thought the perfect woman could be created (in my offshore lab) by mixing equal parts of:

• Sophia Loren - Hot Italian blood and general class
• Gilda Radner - Humor and general craziness
• Liv Tyler - Lips and general aura
• Kristi Yamaguchi - Legs and general gracefulness
• Charo - That elusive "hoochie coochie girl" quality
• Julia Child - Hey, a man's gotta eat