The Demonizing of Children
Whatever you think about subsidized health care in this country, you would have to be Ebenezer Scrooge before his enlightenment to do what the Republican Dirty Tricks Machine (what I like to call the RDTM) is doing to some little kids who just… want to live.
It seems there is this program called S-CHIP that needed some funding by the U.S. government to stay afloat. It only needed about $35 million dollars or so, and it would have been fine. Congress passed the funding bill through both houses no problem. The Decider vetoed it apparently following his argument (paraphrasing now), “If someone needs health care, there’s always the emergency room.”
The Democrats brought out 12 year old Graeme Frost to give the rebuttal to a Decider radio address on this very issue (The Decider thinks that $5 billion is enough to fund this program). Graeme and his family is exactly the kind of situation S-CHIP is intended to help. According to this Wikipedia entry, The Decider vetoed the S-CHIP bill on 10/3, then the Democrats said they were going to fight to get the veto overturned, then the RDTM was set in motion.
The Comedian Rush Limbaugh blasted the Frosts on his radio show, Michelle Malkin blogged about it, Michael Hemingway at The National Review Online wrote a column about it, etc. Hemingway’s piece was a neocon screed involving another family whose daughter was featured in a TV ad about the benefits of S-CHIP. To Hemingway’s mind, two-year old Bethany Wilkerson should have been left to die of her heart defect. Of course, if he thinks that, maybe he thinks Bethany’s mom Dara should have had an abortion; oh, wait a minute, she has no right to do that either. I guess Dara had only two alternatives; let Bethany die at three months, or give her away to a “more deserving and sensible” family who could afford to take care of her.
All the Congress was asking for was $35 billion over 5 years. A paltry sum, when you consider that we are pouring $1-4 billion a month down the Iraqi rat-hole. But The Decider doesn’t want anything getting in the way of his beloved quagmire (as The Decider would say, “Heh, Heh. That’s a funny word, qualify…”) so, he vetoed with the provision that if Congress sent the bill back at $5 billion over 5 years, he would sign it. Unfortunately for Graeme and Bethany, in order for them to get health care they’ll have to start working at a textile mill, or a coal mine, because I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the agenda items on the neocon to-do list is to get rid of those pesky child labor laws (I’m riffing now, sorry).
This goes hand in hand with what I was saying about the level of political discourse in this country. Forget what you think about S-CHIP for a moment. We can’t just “agree to disagree” and move on (no, righties, that is not a MoveOn.org ad). If I have an opinion that is even slightly left of John Wayne’s, and you are “conservative” it is your job to get everything you can get on me and take me down in public, because to you, my opinion doesn’t matter. I should shut up, I have a “political agenda,” and I should be hung from an oak tree in the town square.
Again, regardless what you think about S-CHIP, attacking kids, left or right, is wrong. That is like going up to a paraplegic in a wheelchair and pushing him over a cliff. The paraplegic is defenseless. So are the children.
I guess the decider is too busy on becoming the dictator rather than care about kids.
I saved this article and didn’t publish it originally. New developments; The Decider has now been briefed on whom S-CHIP was designed to help (kids whose parents make too much to apply for Medicaid, but not enough to get health insurance) and the Congress sent the bill up again, and The Decider vetoed it, again.