Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Suffer the children

Astounding:
In a stunning rebuke to congressional leaders, and to the six (out of 10) Republican Senate Finance Committee members who supported legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the White House threatened to veto bills that would have covered millions of children.

The article goes on to give "a few choice quotes from the Office of Management and Budget's veto-threat statements" trying to explain this despicable decision, and show exactly why each of them are laughable. One of those excuses is this:
The proposed expansion "would cause millions of individuals to drop their private insurance in order to be involved with a government insurance plan."

Even if this is true, why would that be a reason to veto the legislation? I just can't understand some people's fetishism of privatization and the "free market".

Anywho. The article ends with this jab:
Before, "compassionate conservatism" may have seemed like a political bumper sticker. Now it seems like the punch line of a sad joke, at the expense of millions of impoverished children.

Indeed. There's the old line, "The Moral Majority is neither". I'm thinking the same of "compassionate conservatism." Although I suppose one could argue that stuff like this is "conservative" because it's small-government.

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