Joe Barton: “When I was a little boy, I used to read comic books, and one of them I read was Superman. In the Superman comic books…”

“When I was a little boy, I used to read comic books, and one of them I read was Superman. In the Superman comic books, way back in the 1960s, Superman had an alterego that lived on Bizarro World. {time} 1615 In Bizarro World, everything was a little bit off-kilter. When I listen to my sincerely good friends on the minority side, I think they are on Bizarro World. I know they mean well, but they are not seeing the same planet I am seeing. I have told this story a number of times about my brother John at the age of 40 having liver cancer. He had exhausted all conventional therapy. He was given less than 3 months to live. Being a Member of Congress and on the Energy and Commerce Committee, I had access to the National Institutes of Health and the FDA. I called, and I said: Are there any experimental programs that you could get my brother into that might help him? They checked, and they had a clinical trial, I believe, in San Antonio, Texas. We called down, and they got him into it. But they told him: This is experimental. It has helped a lot of people so far, but it doesn't help everybody. And if it doesn't help you, it accelerates your disease. He and his wife prayed about it, and his mother and myself and his brother and sister, and we all decided, why not? They put John in the trial, and it didn't help him, but we were at peace because we had used every available remedy that we could to try to help him.…”