Collateral Damage

It's official: the American people elected a total asshat into the whitehouse in 2004.

Good ol' Dub-ya has, after six years of presidency, exercised his first-ever veto of a bill passed through congress.

And what, you may ask, was such a horrendous threat to the world that our illustrious president decided to block a bill that had already received congressional assent? What was so terrible that Dub-ya felt that for the first time in his entire presidency, he had to stop it from happening? What could possibly make Bush exercise the Presidential veto that the past three presidents never once used in their entire times in office?

Stem cell research.

Yes, our great and illustrious president decided that Stem Cell research was such a horrid threat that he'd veto a bill which would have allowed it.

Yep, Bush thinks that life is so sacred that he's blocking research performed on invisible clumps of cells; which he apparently thinks is the equivalent of walking up to someone and shooting them in the head.

'Course, when it's dropping bombs on Iraqi civilians, it's "collateral damage."

And, lest we forget, while Governor of Texas, Bush shattered all records across the country for most death row inmates executed while under his charge. But that's "justice."

As of this writing, there are approximately 400,000 embryos on ice in the United States of America. Until this bill was vetoed, those embryos could have been used to find cures for Parkinsons, Diabetes, paraplegia, MS, ALS, severe brain damage... Stem cells could mean an end to organ shortages. Now that this bill has been vetoed, those embryos can be either used for InVitro Fertilization, or destroyed. This bill would have allowed those slated for destruction to be used for research. Apparently, according to the Pro-Life brigade in the US, this would be the equivalent of mass murder.

Now, for some reason that is somewhat beyond my capacity to grasp, Bush decided to announce his vetoing of this bill while surrounded by "Snowflake Babies," their term, for the record, not mine. These babies were formed from embryos which were frozen; exactly the type of embryos that would have been used for this research. The irony is that none of these babies would exist if it weren't, literally, for decades worth of research performed on human embryonic cells; but Bush is going to studiously ignore that one, methinks.

Oh, and let's not forget, IVF requires implantation of several blastocysts in the hope that just one of them will grow into a full fledged human being.

All the others, I guess they're just "collateral damage."