Even when right he gets it wrong.

George Bush has been a president who never met a law he didn’t like or spending bill for that matter. For six years he has infested the White House with his dogmatic, Christianist agenda. He has made government bigger but not better --- just bigger --- much bigger. He is a believer in total government with all powers centered in himself. Why himself? Because he believes he is ordained by God to remake the world, a delusion that is annoying in most but dangerous in the few who have actual power.

Now the Imperial President has finally discovered that he has the power to veto legislation. And what did he use it on? It wasn’t another one of the Pork Barrel, big spending bills pushed by the Republicans. He loves Pork, he loves spending. It wasn’t to veto some new bill reducing the power and scope of government. He loves powerful, ambitious government. He is the most consistent advocate of big government to sit in the White House since, since... well actually he may be the most consistent advocate of big government to ever sit in the White House. He is certainly giving FDR a run for his money in that race.

If Bush didn’t drool his religion all over the place he could easily be mistaken for a member of the Old Left.

What onerous piece of legislation did Bush finally find to oppose? It was bill that would loosen federal funding of stem cell research. Now I would not support the bill but not for the reason given by Big Government George. I don’t think the federal government has a legitimate function in funding research. That is not what government ought to be about. Big government advocates, however, what government in everything. And so does Bush. He just hates the research. It is not out of a principle of limited government that this veto was born.

Bush vetoed the bill because it violates his Christianist agenda. The theocon President drooled on about how the law would “support the taking of innocent human life.” Rubbish and nonsense. Stem cells are not human life.

Bush displayed young children saying: “These boys and girls are not spare parts.” Nope. They were fully developed, living, breathing human beings. He didn’t hold up a stem cell. He held up a child. But in his theology a cell is the same thing as human being. He claimed the children “remind up of what is lost when embryos re destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells.”

Of course we know that every human cell is potentially a human being. Any cell can be cloned into a human being but that does not mean that every cell is a human being.

The theocrat in Bush is what came out. There is no Reagan here. In fact Nancy Reagan was lobbying in favour of the bill. And even Republicans, realizing that their hobnobbing with the Religious Right is now turning into a liability, had supported the bill though almost all the 37 Senators who opposed the law where Republicans.

It is no surprise that the one thing that Bush got right was done for the wrong reasons. The reasoning behind his veto is what makes Bush so dangerous a president -- he is unthinkingly behind a theocratic concept of government.