Michael Ledeen is psyched:
Since so many of the injuries [suffered by American troops in the Middle East] involve violent explosions (think IEDs and their successor bombs and mines), we have a considerable number of amputees who need artificial limbs. And the Pentagon went to the people who developed the Sedgway scooter and said, in essence, if you guys are so smart why don't you make prostheses that move like real arms, hands, legs and feet? And they did. Fast, even. Have a look at this terrific video. I think I may have posted it before, but it's worth a hard, proud look. And it even sounds like one of my faves, robocop...Sedgway inventor Dean Kamen's next project?--a Republican guilt stimulator. We can rebuild them. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first guilty Republicans. Better than they were before. Better, responsible, moral.
Update: Maybe I should add that I have significant expertise in both upper and lower extremity prosthetics, that I can tell you Dean Kamen is wildly exaggerating his team's successes and that Michael Ledeen is, as usual, pretty much completely full of shit. The notion that any of the heroic amputee victims of his Iraq adventure will ever resemble a Hollywood special effects "robocop" is a cruel and selfish pipe dream.
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