The veto is one of the president’s most important powers. Unlike wiretapping without a warrant or indefinite detention without charges or trial, this power is actually given to the president by the U.S. Constitution.

George W. Bush is the first president since James A. Garfield never to use the veto. (Garfield was shot a few months after taking office.)

Bush has threatened to use the veto a few times, and it’s instructive to see what issues stir him up enough to reach for the veto pen.

For example, he threatened to veto any law that included the anti-torture language put forth by John McCain, a Republican senator who knew something about torture because he had been a POW in the Vietnam War. After McCain’s language was approved by about 90 percent of both houses of Congress — enough to override a veto — Bush signed it into law, tacking on a “signing statement” that said essentially that he didn’t have to obey the law if he didn’t feel like it.

And now he’s threatening to veto any attempt by Congress to block the turnover of operations of six eastern U.S. ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. His Treasury Secretary, John Snow, who had business dealings with the company before joining the administration, had a duty to review the deal, but says he first learned of it “by reading it in the newspapers.”

The White House is accusing its critics of bigotry. Dubai has been an ally in the current fight against terrorist groups. Press Secretary Scott McClellan says “We shouldn’t be holding a Middle Eastern company to a different standard” than companies from other parts of the world.

It that true?

Just a few weeks ago, twenty-three al Qaeda prisoners escaped from a prison in Yemen. Yemen, like Dubai, is an ally in the anti-terrorist fight. It is believed the escapees had inside help. Do you suppose they would have found enough sympathetic insiders to escape from a prison in some other part of the world?

Am I suggesting that Middle Eastern people are inherently untrustworthy? Not at all.

Listen: during the 1960s, in some parts of the United States, the men who bombed a Birmingham, Alabama church and killed four little girls were treated like heroes. In the 1990s, some Americans wanted to help fugitive Eric Rudolph, who killed and injured people in a series of bombings, including one at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

If people like that were considered heroes by some Americans, would it be surprising to learn that some otherwise upstanding citizens of Dubai, from all walks of life, secretly feel sympathy for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda? It would be disappointing if a quiet al Qaeda sympathizer with inside knowledge of U.S. port operations used that knowledge to help jihadists smuggle people or material into the United States, but would it be surprising?

Well, terrorism has been good for George W. Bush. I suppose another attack would help his approval ratings, which have been down in the dumps.

Sarah Vowell on The Daily Show:

The thing about the current president is — I wrote about this a little bit — how he keeps opening up new possibilities for us. You know, like I talk about going to his inauguration and standing there and crying when he took the oath, ’cause I was so afraid that he would wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water. The failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.