Facing the Cold, Stark Truth

Three (or more) rousing cheers for Pete Stark:

Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, told Republicans: “You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

The catcalls from the right are totally predictable: "beneath contempt," "accusing our troops of blowing up innocents," "exploiting our children in a hateful attack on our troops," "the Democrats should denounce, blahblahblah," "Stark should apologize, yaddayaddayadda...."

The truth: Stark told it. He is absolutely right. And all the Republican cries about "decency and decorum" and "crass appeals to the worst, most base elements of our population" cannot change the fact that Stark is right. Pres. Bush does want to keep spending limitless amounts of money on blowing up innocent people and killing our troops for his own ego gratification (if not amusement), and he does absolutely not want to spend an extra dime on sick children. Like it or not, in this society, we measure our priorities in dollars. When blank checks are handed out like Halloween candy to keep a war going ad infinitum, and then we are told there is no money in the bank when it comes to paying for health care for uninsured children, we know which policy the president cares about and which he could care less about. All the wingnut hysteria in the world will not change that simple truth.

As Nicole Belle reminds us, "... [T]he cost of the expanded SCHIP program is what we pay in Iraq in THREE WEEKS."

Wingnuttery is on display at Sadly, No! where we see Republican House member Steve King pointing to a chart he created, "claiming the S-CHIP really stands for 'Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents.'”

King must have picked up the idea from Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL): "Earlier this week, [he] told USA Today that he refers to SCHIP as 'Socialized, Cuba-style Health care for Illegals and their Parents.'"

I'm waiting for Republicans to ask Feeney and King to apologize to the six million American children and their families, who are all U.S. citizens and who all qualified legitimately under SCHIP guidelines for the health care coverage they receive.

Uh, no. Actually, I'm not.