The Neo-Bolsheviks

If you've been watching the Republicans bob and weave on the Iraq Spending Bill over the last few days, you may have noticed a disturbing, recurring theme that's been cropping up of late: In the eyes of many in the GOP, the welfare and security of Iraqi families and businesses are worth many times more than their American counterparts.

President Bush has said he'll veto the final bill because both versions currently set dates to withdraw troops as well as funding unrelated domestic projects. Republican lawmakers and non-partisan watchdogs also have criticized the domestic projects, calling them pork. Both bills contain more than $90 billion for the military to continue operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But money for domestic programs pushes each bill's total spending to more than $120 billion.

Here's a few of the larger unrelated domestic projects:

• 6.7 billion in to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. That includes aid for housing, public infrastructure funding, and aid to Gulf Coast commercial fishermen.
• 4.2 billion in disaster aid for farmers wiped out or hurt by drought and flood. This includes aid to dairy farmers, spinach producers, and peanut growers.
• 2 billion for port, airline, rail, and mass transit security.
• 750 million for the health insurance of American children living in poverty.

You can see what an inexcusable waste of money that is, compared to the GOP's 315 million dollar bridge to nowhere or tax breaks for big oil? So, the Decider decided, along with the usual compassionate conservative suspects in the background, to object to the domestic portion, saying its full of pork, that democrats should be ashamed of attaching these spending measures to the bill, although he did add with a smirk that he "likes peanuts as much as the next guy."

Get that? Forking over another ten or twenty grand on top of the sixty or seventy-thousand already spent for every family in Iraq is absolutely vital the Republicans tell us. But spending a fraction of that on American farmers hit by drought, suicide bombers stalking our subways, US residents rebuilding after the worst natural disaster in our nation's history, or the health of our own little kids is just peanuts.

What The Hell has happened to the Republican Party under this rudderless WH? It seems like just yesterday they were fiercely loyal defenders of Mainstreet USA and proud, pragmatic American capitalists. Now they sound like the Socialist Party of the Iraqi Welfare State, asking, nay, demanding we pay for Iraqi police, schools, roads, utilities, and healthcare, all suckling on the teat of the US taxpayer, hell bent on throwing our own under the bus, with no end in sight.

Indeed, putting aside for a moment the immense human tragedy BushCo has wrought with this radical break from traditional conservative principles, the end result is, if anything, worse than socialism. For in this neconservative Bolshevik version, the costs are socialized courtesy of We the People, but the profits are privatized, and the overpriced, cost-plus hospitals, schools, or bridges built, maintained, and held in coalition control at our great expense only benefit a few locals in Iraq. This massive fraud is what our brilliant policy makers in the WH call "Free Market Magic." Given their spending priorities, one has to wonder if Bush and his conservative comrades have confused the people they ostensibly represent with residents of Sadr City who praise the economic ideology of François Mitterrand.

If the neocons really insist on sustaining an enormous, dependent welfare state on our dime, perhaps they should use their own precious blood and treasure, or better yet, move to Baghdad and run for office there. Afterall, last we heard from rightwing never-land, the surge was working, you can stroll the streets unarmed in complete safety, and there are plenty of bombed-out, bullet-riddled political vacancies as a result of the ongoing genocidal civil war minor birth pangs of a new, inspiring democracy.

Meanwhile, back here in America the political reality is crystal clear. The public does not support this President on Iraq or anything else, and voters want our troops out within a year. So politicians be brave or beware: If you won't vote to end it, come election time that public may well vote to end you.