Here we are in Year Six of the Bush Administration, and President Bush is about to use his first veto ... ever.

Were you aware? In his first term, Bush didn't veto a single bill. Now, halfway through his second term, he finally vetoes a bill. And what is it about? It's a bill authorizing federal funding for stem cell research. Recall that, back in 2001, before he became the Terror President, Bush had nothing better to worry about than stacked energy policies and stem cells. The Religious Right -- which is at the core of Bush's base -- detests using embryonic stem cells for research, and in 2001, Bush issued an Executive Order placing a moratorium on federal funding for new embryonic stem cells lines. There were already sixty embryonic stem cell lines in existence, he said, and the government will continue to fund those. (Of course, it is now well-documented that Bush lied when he said there were sixty stem cell lines. Currently, there are about twenty viable lines, with "viable" being the key word.)

The bill, passed in 2005 by the House and Tuesday by the Senate, allowed couples who had embryos frozen in fertility clinics to donate them to research. Bush vetoed the bill this morning, saying that the bill "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. "

"Oh, really?" counters Salon contributor Scott Rosenberg:

Here is why Bush's position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded.

If Bush and his administration truly believe that destroying an embryo is a kind of murder, they shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about research funding: They should immediately shut down every fertility clinic in the country, arrest the doctors and staff who operate them, and charge all the wannabe parents who have been wantonly slaughtering legions of the unborn.

But of course they'll never do such a thing. (Nor, to be absolutely clear, do I think they should.) Bush could not care less about this issue except as far as it helps burnish his pro-life credentials among his "base." This has been true since the first airing of Bush's position in 2001, as I said back then. So he finds a purely symbolic way of taking a stand, but won't follow the logic of his position to the place where it might cause him any political harm -- as opposing the family-building dreams of millions of middle-class Americans would doubtless do.

If Bush stated his opposition to the destruction of embryos as including fertility clinics, there would be riots in the streets and he would never be spoken to again. So, instead of being put to some use, these embryos from fertility clinics will be destroyed anyway! "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research," he said of children born of "adopted" embryos from fertility clinics. But these are few and far-between; thousands of embryos will be destroyed -- not in the name of research -- but in the name of nothing! The argument is the same as that for abortion: "You could be aborting the next Einstein." The point is moot! There's an equal chance that I'm aborting the anti-Christ; it really doesn't matter. The same goes for posturing with these children: sure, it's great that they were born from adopted embryos. That's great. But if they hadn't been born from those embryos, because the embryos were destroyed, we wouldn't miss them at all! What Bush should have done is brought a vial of frozen embryos on stage to cuddle with. Of course, humans don't respond to frozen embryos the same way they do to babies, so some of the pathos gets lost.