George W. Bush was crowned America's first officially un-elected dictator in January 2001. In all the time between then and now, he never once vetoed a bill. That was because he never really had to, given a Republican-controlled Congress that had yet to pass legislation the Shrub truly didn't like.
Until today.
Even though Congress had managed to pass a bill providing federal funding for the use of embryonic stem cells that are discarded by the thousands annually by fertility clinics across the country, Bush finally issuded his first ever veto.
In doing so, he has once again fucked over every single American whose debilitating illness could be cured or treated through the use of embryonic stem cells. The bill passed by Congress, which passed the House of Representatives a year ago and passed the Senate this Tuesday, contained no known provision that would have allowed for aborted fetuses as a source of embryonic stem cells. Instead, embryos discarded by fertility clinics would have been the source. There would have been no new wave of abortions to supply researchers with fresh cell clusters.
The type of embryo in question, a sort of hollow "bubble" of undifferentiated cells called a blastocyst, is more desirable because unlike adult stem cells--which cannot be used for general research and are widely considered unusable--its cells have not yet gone through the process that switches on and off the gemes that decide what the cells will become: arms, legs, bones, blood, etc. Virtually no stem cells exist in the human brain, which is one of the reasons it cannot regenerate. It is also why it is impossible to harvest adult stem cells that can be used to heal spinal injuries and defects.
The same day he told Americans crippled by debilitating spinal injuries and neural illnesses to fuck off, he wasn't providing funding for research that could cure them, the Shrub signed into law a bill that--in tandmen with the stem cell reseach bill he vetoed--would have alleviated the concerns of people who hysterically think stem cell research will lead to abortions solely for the purposes of harvesting stem cells. So what we have now is a ban on using aborted fetuses for stem cell research, and a denial of the very research the ban was intended to help.
In signing the ban, Bush said, "Human beings are not a raw material to be exploited, or a commodity to be bought or sold." That's a sick joke coming from George W. Bush, who thought absolutely nothing of using American soldiers and Iraqi civilians as fodder for his pointless, fucked up war of aggression against Iraq. Hypocrisy is speaking out against exploiting human beings as commodities, while using human beings as commodities.
And so the Shrub marks a first in his twisted reign of terror; he issued his first ever veto. But it was just another in a long line of exercises in fucking over Americans desperate for medical treatment. And in that regard, it is just business as usual in Bush's dictatorship.
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