Republican porkbarrel spending during the last four years of the Bush administration has been astronomically high, with graft and corruption at unheard-of levels. Tax cuts have abounded for every wealthy person and corporation from every angle, multiple times. A torrent of purely political legislation has been tearing through Congress with Bush’s implicit and complicit approval. Bush has never vetoed any of it. Not a single corrupt bill laden with pork.

So when Bush finally does use his first veto in almost six years, I suppose it is only appropriate that he has chosen to use it to stop stem-cell research legislation. After all, it is only an issue that two-thirds of Americans and the vast majority of scientists support, an issue based on good, hard science and medicine, and legislation that could save millions of lives and end the suffering of millions more. The reason? To protect the human rights of a blastocyst ten times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. The same blastocysts that are routinely and legally destroyed anyway (as many as 100,000 per year) in the process of in-vitro fertilization methods. To enshrine those discarded cell clusters at the expense of born infants, of children, of adults of the elderly, of real people in anguish and in peril of death. To pander to the most extreme religious elements of the political spectrum to the detriment of the people as a whole, and firmly set America’s medical science in the fundamentalist backwaters of the world.

And it is hardly surprising that the Republicans are angling to use this to their political gain, even after Republicans in Congress shot down any chance of a veto override. Yes, it’s a red-letter day for Bush and the Republican party.