When most Presidents have used their veto power to send a message to Congress, the message has generally been either “stop the wasteful spending” or “this legislation is too liberal/conservative”. George Bush has finally issued his first veto and the message he’s sending to Congress is (I’m paraphrasing here) “I’m an ignorant, hypocritical, coward who cares about nothing more than the appeasement of the most reactionary extremists within my base”. Everything the Congress has done over the last few years has been acceptable enough to the President to support (or at least pretend to support), but medical research apparently crosses the line.

As the President spoke today about his unprecedented veto, he surrounded himself with children that were concieved via IVF. It seems to me that a man standing on an ethical principle as strong as a “reverence for the gift of life” wouldn’t have to hide behind children to make his point. As he waxed about how “each of these children began his or her life as a frozen embryo”, he didn’t seem to have much to say about the children’s thousands of frozen siblings waiting to be disposed with the rest of the medical waste. Apparently the moral position on this issue is that frozen embryos shouldn’t be mined for “spare parts”, because the Lord wants frozen embryos to get tossed out with the dirty hypodermic needles and used bandages. Thanks for the lecture on “fundamental morals”, Mr. President.

People who oppose this honestly seem to believe the choice is between an embryo becoming a baby or being mined for stem cells when the reality is that the fate of the embryos in question is already sealed. They’re garbage. Just the byproducts of a procedure that none of the stem-cell opponents have the political courage to fight (assuming they really do buy this whole “embryos are people” crap). Regardless of what happens in Washington, they’re going to “die”. So the choice isn’t between life and death, but whether that “death” can be used to “promote a culture of life” (to borrow a phrase from Bush). So anyone who thinks the stem cell issue is analagous to the abortion debate is a moron. If anything, this isn’t much different than the choice of whether or not you want to be an organ donor, but in this case the President has decided that he should be the one to make the choice for all of us.