President Bush has always defied caricature by being so over-the-top stupid and evil that an honest assessment of him sounds like hyperbole. Shrill, even.
I'll spare everyone a heated reprisal of his most awful moments to date. (OK, a few: "Please, don't kill me;" "You've covered your ass, now;" "I know they're here somewhere;" "Bring it on;" etc.).
But what do you say when he wants to make sure kids who didn't take personal responsibility to have rich parents don't have health insurance? I'm really not exaggerating when I say that. His view, doubtless shared by many serious conservatives who don't have to worry about this shit, is that it would be inappropriate for the government to expand a successful, popular program that provides health insurance to kids whose parents are unable to do so.
(I mean, this is a perfect, gift-wrapped data point to back up my Unified Theory of Republican-Conservative Philosophy; Namely: "If something bad is happening to someone else, it's just not my problem, and caring about it would be an inappropriate reaction.)
Although the combination of a deeply unpopular, radical, lame-duck president with an opposition Congress is certainly a potential problem, this isn't some petulant, scorched-earth tactic. Bush isn't kicking over the sand castle to spite everyone else. This is an honest attempt to enshrine a conservative* policy. And if some kids have to get sick or die, well, you can't make a wonderful omlette of conservative utopian policies without breaking a few eggs. By which we mean kids, apparently. Lovely.
August has always been the month in which he got the most people killed.
* I was going to have a cute little moment here when an old conservative comes back from the dead to wag his (undoubtedly, right) finger at me for calling the modern Republican party conservative, when it's clearly a just a coalition of business interests, religious extremists, xenophobic bigots and citizens crazed with fear and clinging to whatever authoritarian branch they can find. But my mind has been so warped by a lifetime of equating "conservativism" with the tofurky pot pie served up by Reagan, Thatcher, et al that the exercise was threatening to sink the whole post. If you must, pretend the ghost of Edmund Burke came back or something.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
From the headline, I thought this was about me.
holy christ. to think i was once a member of the party makes me want to swallow a knife. i have to hand it to him though, he never ceases to find new ways to surprise America. truly unbelievable.
"kids who didn't take personal responsibility to have rich parents"
Classic, but I must ask, why do you hate America?
Post a Comment