Dole Toes the Know-Nothing Party Line

While, amazingly, Dick Burr was voting for stem cell research yesterday in the Senate, Liddy Dole was voting against it.

El Presidente, also amazingly, says he has "moral" objections to it and will sign his first-ever veto.

Sometimes the irony piles up so deep it threatens to clog all our intake pipes.

Earlier in the House, Madam Foxx naturally voted against stem cell research, along with fellow North Carolinians Patrick McHenry, Sue Myrick, Walter Jones, Charlie Taylor, and Robin Hayes. They're proud conservatives ... keeping Parkinson's disease safe for the foreseeable future.

Walter Douglas asks, rhetorically, whether Bush's promised veto is coming "from personal belief or political expedience?" We know that the 33 percent who still worship at his feet believe he's doing it out of a faith-based philosophy, deeply held. But anyone watching the antics of the president in St. Petersburg, talking trash with his mouth full of biscuit, is hard pressed to see anything more than puddle-deep in his "philosophical" makeup.

He's appealing to his right-wing, religious fundamentalist base, which means he's playing politics with science, with healing, and with people's lives. Nothing new there.

UPDATE: This rightwing Republican site can barely mask its perplexity over Sen. Burr's vote on stem-cell research. "Burr did not put out a statement explaining a vote likely to be controversial with his conservative Christian supporters."