Day: July 19, 2006

Bush Uses ‘Snowflake’ Children As Props But Says They Are Not ‘Spare Parts’

Jon Ponder

If God is vengeful, She will smite President Bush with an illness that can only be cured by stem cells from discarded embryos.

The event staged by the White House today to announce the president’s veto of the embryonic stem cell research bill was one of the most obscenely crass political displays of the Bush presidency, and that is saying a lot.

In a cynical attempt to focus the public’s attention away from the estimated 100 million mostly adult Americans suffering from diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s who could have benefited from the research, the president’s political operatives filled the room with a dozen or so “snowflake” children who were born from frozen embryos reclaimed from fertility clinics.

The craven use of these children as political props became acutely ironic when Bush said of them, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.”

Indeed, the children were not spare parts — they were red herrings. What the White House did not want the public to know was that the potentially life-saving research the president vetoed would have been performed only on embryos slated to be destroyed because their infertile parents no longer need them.

Prior to the staged event, cameras weren’t allowed in the room when President Bush actually signed the veto, which was the first of his six-year presidency. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support embryonic stem cell research, and with midterm elections just four months away, Karl Rove and the president’s political team did not want clips of the president signing the veto showing up in Democrats’ campaign ads.

If God is vengeful, She will smite President Bush with an illness that can only be cured by stem cells from discarded embryos.

Pensito Review Releases Draft of Bush Veto Signing Statement

Buck Banks

Executive power play: President George Bush today vetoed a bipartisan bill that sought to expand the limitations currently imposed on human stem cell research purportedly based on his religious beliefs. It was Bush’s first veto of a congressional bill in the five-and-a-half years of his presidency.

Instead of vetoing bills he disagrees with, Bush usually cheerfully signs them in public ceremonies that make it appear that he gets along with the legislative branch of government and even thinks it serves a useful purpose. Then, as soon as everyone leaves the room, he does a take-back via the signing statement.

A signing statement is a written proclamation issued by the executive branch that accompanies the signing of a law passed by the government’s legislature. Historically, they are mainly used for rhetorical or political proclamations, but U.S. presidents have used them to set forth how they intend the executive branch of the federal government to interpret and enforce the new law.

Pensito Review’s investigative team has uncovered what appears to be an early draft of a signing statement Bush intends to append to his veto of the stem cell bill today. Ordinarily, presidents do not attach signing statements to vetos, but it is obvious that Bush wants to extend his “take-back” powers to vetos, in case he ever does it again.

Here is what is believed to be an early draft of Bush’s veto signing statement recovered from a discarded dictaphone transcript:

As president of the United States of America, I hereby exercise my absolute power as supreme … no, strike that, … as commander and chief to determine at some time henceforth in the future … man, I like to add in those henceforths … to re-, re- … what’s that word? … oh yeah, rescind … rescind this veto of the Stem Cell Research Expansion Act and hold it not to be applicable to the executive branch except insofar as I say so.

It would be my perogative to rescind the veto as command and chief in the following circumstances: In the event that Mom or Dad, or both, or Jeb or any other close family relatives, and maybe Karl Rove, comes down with kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer or diseases of the nervous system, such as Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease, or any other illness that expanded stem cell research holds great promise for the treatment or cure of.

Katrina II: Bush’s Faltering Response to Middle East War Is a Disaster in the Making

Jon Ponder

We can only hope Sec. Rice won’t indulge in a shoe-shopping spree in Manhattan while she dithers over her itinerary in the Middle East.

Heckuva job: When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, millions watched in horror as the Bush Administration sat by while hundreds of thousands of American citizens became refugees in their own land, and hundreds more struggled and drowned in the flooded streets of New Orleans.

I remember thinking then that what we were seeing — or rather, not seeing — in response to Katrina could be a dire precursor of an even worse situation if the Bush team found itself confronted with an international crisis on the scale of Katrina or greater.

It is too early into the latest outburst of war in the Middle East to know whether it will erupt into a wider war, but what is abundantly clear even now is that the president’s strategy toward the crisis is harrowingly reminiscent of the hands-off, too-little-too-late approach we witnessed post-Katrina.

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