DISQUS

Jeff · 11 months ago

With stem cells, I think Bush actually thought he had come to a compromise solution that would please everyone--no government money for certain stem cell research, but no prohibition on private industry. Now, maybe this wasn't much of a compromise--it certainly wasn't perceived as one--but I don't think it was intended to be some great partisan salvo. (My problem with the stem cell decision announcement was mostly that it was a show intended to prove that Bush was capable of thinking about complicated issues--it was designed to try to make the president look smart--not necessarily conservative--but smart. It was not convincing on this point.)

Deuce Loosely · 11 months ago

While i disagreed with the policy, i had a bigger problem with the way he chose to enact it: grandstanding by surrounding himself with "snowflake" babies, saying that those children weren't "spare parts", which implied that others felt they were. His veto was going to get enough attention, seeing that it was his first, so his little show was completely unnecessary. In fact, if he had framed it more like you did ("In ethically uncertain areas such as this, we believe the government should take a back seat to private funding") instead of as some hypocritical "culture of life" decision (hypocritical since he never made any moves to restrict fertility clinics) it might have been easier to deal with. But that's not how that administration did things.