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Last updated on: July 19, 2006 at 6:25 pm by Fred Clark

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1 for 142 2006-07-19T18:25:40-04:00 Fred Clark

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James A. Garfield's record is safe.* After more than five years in office, President George W. Bush has vetoed a bill.

Bush had threatened a veto 141 times previously, but never followed through. Today he proved that when he says something 142 times, he means what he says at least once. If President Bush says he's going to do something, you can be sure he will — at least 0.7 percent of the time.

Reuters' Tabassum Zakaria and Joanne Kenen report:

President Bush used his first veto on Wednesday to block legislation to expand embryonic stem-cell research, putting him at odds with top scientists and most Americans, including some in his own Republican Party.

"It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it," Bush said.

The legislation, passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, now returns to Capitol Hill, where it does not appear to have the two-thirds majority needed to overturn Bush's first veto since taking office more than five years ago. …

The veto fulfills a Bush promise made to socially conservative supporters whose votes his Republican Party will need in November to help keep control of the Senate and House. …

Even conservative Republicans who generally oppose abortion are divided. Bush sees the research as destroying a human life, but others, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the embryos are slated for destruction anyway. …

Several polls have shown a clear majority of Americans support the research, which would use embryos that already exist in fertility clinics and would otherwise be thrown out. …

Bush announced his veto before a White House audience including some families of children born from adopted embryos, called "snowflake babies" by opponents of the stem-cell research.

This is what President Bush means by a "moral boundary." He believes that these embryos must never be used for research, because morality demands that they be tossed in the trash with yesterday's coffee grounds.

The photo-op with the "snowflake babies" is meaningless. Bush wasn't signing a law mandating that the soon-to-be-discarded embryos from fertility clinics be put up for adoption. By blocking this legislation he was ensuring that these embryos be thrown away, scrapped, destroyed. And he did so claiming that this was a sign of respect for what he claims to believe are fully human persons.

He does not — cannot — really believe any such thing.

To really believe this, and to casually continue to permit these embryos to be destroyed, would be monstrous. If Bush really thought the "snowflake babies" sideshow were anything more than duplicitous hot air, he would be a moral monster for not immediately acting on that belief and sending in the national guard to save the lives of the thousands of American citizens now languishing in freezers in fertility clinics across the country.

Meanwhile, thanks to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, every high school student who wants to skip out on biology lab because dissecting frogs is gross now has a new catch-phrase:

"I'm not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something that is living and making it dead for the purpose of research."

Members of PETA may also find this slogan useful. They can now cite the press secretary as stating that the president shares their belief that medical experimentation on animals should be illegal.

Next in Tony Snow's crosshairs: The makers of Listerine and Lysol.

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* The Reuters article cited above notes that "Bush is the first president to complete four years in office without a veto since John Quincy Adams in the 1820s." Garfield, however, remains the only president in modern baseball (since the Civil War) never to use the veto.

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