SCHIP of Fools

Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you've likely heard about the controversy surrounding the SCHIP program, which is designed to provide health insurance for poor children. That's a fairly worthy goal and the program, under its current parameters, generally does a good job. But doing a good job is something that's generally alien to the government, so the brilliant minds of the Democratic Party decided that they should take this modest program and turn it into something that would be more to their liking, i.e., a monstrosity. So they sent a greatly enlarged version of the program to President Bush, at least partly as veto bait. Bush dutifully vetoed the bill and that gave the D's the pretext to start another round of moral preening and a series of really nasty political ads on local television and radio, mostly aimed at making Michelle Bachmann feel miserable.

Well, the veto was sustained today, which led to some really good theater in Washington. Consider this reasoned, measured response from the lovely and talented Fortney "Pete" Stark, whose California district borders that of Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“I yield myself two minutes. Madam speaker, I, first of all, I’m just amazed that they can’t figure out — the Republicans are worried that they can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war on children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if he 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.”

I would call that unhinged, but that would be too charitable a characterization, no?

Nice to see that the Loyal Opposition is keeping its sense of perspective about things. Honestly, would you want to be President if you had to listen to stuff like that?

A modest proposal from your ol' friend Mr. D - let's have Fortney "Pete" Stark become the Democrats' chief spokesman going forward. He is, I think, the honest voice of the party. He is telling you what a lot of these folks think privately. I truly appreciate his candor. And won't you feel better when Congressman Stark and his pals actually have control of the Congress and the White House, too? Happy days are here again, y'all....