Vetoes ain't a durn thang *clears throat and spits*

Whatever your politics, it is cautionary to discover that the current U.S. president has set a modern era record: He has gone five years without issuing a single veto. That has come, of course, despite ballooning twin deficits and a Congress that never met a barrel it didn’t want to stuff with pork. This quote is especially illustrative of his unusual collaboration with Congress: On many major bills that Bush has signed - No Child Left Behind and tax relief, for example - the veto was never a consideration because the White House itself had proposed the legislation. Yet on dozens of other bills, the president has become a rubber stamp for a spendthrift Congress, betraying his campaign image as a fiscal conservative, critics say. By way of comparison, here are some former presidents and their veto records (all from CS Monitor):