"There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now."
- Allen Ginsburg
When last I diaried, the slow motion train wreck that is the Bush administration had just paused for a brief and tragically comical stop at the Alberto Gonzales congressional hearings wherein our less-than esteemed and now-former Attorney General steadfastly maintained that because he couldn’t remember anything about things he was not at liberty to discuss, he was still the right man for the job. The "surge" was in its infancy and Darth Cheney had not yet become president for an excruciatingly long hour as doctors sent a probe up Bush’s colon, presumably looking for his brain.
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We had not yet heard the tawdry tales of 2 Republican lawmakers, David Vitter of hookers and diapers fame, and Larry Craig whose wide stance and wandering hands in an airport restroom landed him in hot water. We had not yet seen the nightmare of the Minneapolis bridge collapse or heard the stunning story of FEMA trailers emitting noxious formaldehyde vapors causing illnesses to the still displaced and largely forgotten survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
As we move past yet another summer of our discontent, we’ve seen executive orders quickly and quietly signed that increase presidential power to declare martial law and further erode the accepted definitions of torture. We’ve engaged in an embarrassing immigration debate that made a mockery of the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. We’ve heard from a press that has increasingly admitted its failure to ask the necessary questions in the march toward the invasion of Iraq and we watch now as they continue to suffer these same failures as this administration slowly but surely sell this country a war with a more dangerous foe, Iran.
It seems there were at least 2 reports that indicated clearly that Al Queda is as strong or stronger than they were on 9-11 and that the Iraqi government had failed miserably in reaching any of it’s truly important benchmarks - while the president and his minions assured an increasingly hostile American public that his great Middle East democracy agenda was showing real results and we should just be a bit more patient because he was waiting on the report from his boss General Petreaus. To no one’s great surprise, the result of that report has been more war.
For me though, the defining moment of the summer, the clear, jaw-dropping winner of the "I can’t believe this demented idiot of a president said that" award, came during a speech in Nashville in July in which he recognized the sacrifice of a soldier, Kevin Downs who lost both legs in Iraq by saying: "He's a good man. We're going to get him some new legs, and if he hurries up, he can outrun me on the South Lawn of the White House."
Of course this only partially lists the good times from the last 4 or so months. I hadn’t even touched on the departure of Karl Rove or the day-to-day tedium of the presidential campaigns in which 4 or 5 of the Republican candidates rejected evolution in favor of creationism in an early debate and the press engages in a daily battle with cognitive dissonance over both Hillary Clinton’s "inevitability", and her problem of "electability".
For the purpose of brevity though, we’ll move on because what has truly shaken me from my summer somnambulism is an event likely to occur this week that provides further insight into the moral vacuity and ideological underpinnings that seems to drive every decision our decider-in-chief makes.
If things go as expected next week, the president will veto only his fourth piece of legislation since his coronation by the Supreme Court in 2001. A thoughtful, cautious and compassionate conservative, he has wielded the veto pen only to reject the most egregious legislation – and this time will be not different. As in the past with his veto of stem cell legislation on two different occasions and the veto of an Iraq war supplemental spending bill that would dare include a timeline for withdrawal, the latest veto threat saves the country from, gasp! - the expansion of an enormously successful children’s health insurance program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP.
The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is a federal program providing health insurance for families who earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but cannot afford to buy private health insurance. The program was created in 1997 to address the growing number of children in the United States without health insurance.
While viewed as a great success since its inception, at its current level of funding it still leaves many children without health insurance or underinsured. The new proposal would increase to 10 million the number of children covered under SCHIP, an increase of about 4 million children. Last week the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill that would provide $60 billion for the program over the next five years, up $35 billion from the current level of spending. With health care costs rising, the president’s proposal of a modest increase would not even have provided enough funding to support the current number of children enrolled in the program in the next few years. This of course is a prime example of the deceptive and cynical approach to governing that made Karl Rove infamous and has been a hallmark of the Bush years. Propose an increase that isn’t really an increase and then claim the other side is unwilling to compromise.
The same SCHIP bill passed the House of Representatives shortly after the Senate vote, but without enough Republican support to overcome the president’s promised veto.
And why would the president promise to veto a bill that provides additional support and expansion to a program that has so successfully provided health insurance to needy children? Well, he objects to the size of the funding increase. But the additional costs would be covered by an increase in tobacco taxes. Which is really what that objection is about, because as we know, our president lowers taxes (for some), he doesn’t levy them - and certainly not on Big Tobacco.
He also complains that the bill would move middle-class children from private insurance to this public program originally designed to cover low-income children. This will very likely occur. But many more children in middle-class households now go without adequate health insurance as more and more Americans lose employer-based coverage. This however would still not affect the targeted low-income children that the president pretends to care about.
Last week Mr. Bush betrayed the real reason for his astounding stand against providing health insurance for children when he referred to the program’s expansion as "an incremental step toward the goal of government-run health care for every American", thus invoking the dastardly specter of the conservative-eating 3-headed monster in a lab coat, yes folks, "socialized medicine".
Even most Republicans are not buying it in this case, Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who helped write the bill said, "this bill is not socialized medicine...screaming ‘socialized medicine’ is like shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. It is intended to cause hysteria that diverts people from reading the bill, looking at the facts."
A veto from the president on this bill is a near certainty and the Democrats for their part have promised to seriously challenge that. But enough defections by House Republicans to override the veto seem unlikely right now. The Democratic majority’s helplessness on changing the course in Iraq does not foster hope that this piece of legislation will survive the fight intact in the days ahead.
To be fair, the increased spending for SCHIP above that which had been proposed by the president is considerable, but by way of contrast - the Congressional Budget Office’s conservative estimate of $120 billion a year in spending on the Iraq war comes to about $10 billion a month, or $0.3 billion a day – which means that every day, we spend enough money in Iraq to insure 200,000 kids for a year.
Last week, the administration said it would seek $42 billion more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The occupant of the White House has parted ways with sense and rationality and has Washington literally playing politics as death-sport. That it’s now children involved matters little to an administration and its followers frantically clinging to the most reprehensible pieces of its tattered ideology.