Gene's Blog

Just another day in Bushite world

I like that word, Bushite. It rhymes nicely with luddite, which of course they are, although Wikipedia defines them as “…This English historical movement has to be seen in its context of the harsh economic climate due to the Napoleonic Wars; but since then, the term Luddite has been used to describe anyone opposed to technological progress and technological change.” I sort of see it as those who would take us back to a simpler time when men were men and women were servants and objects of fear and hatred, the good old Dark Ages we talked about last night. And, of course, it also fits nicely with Shiite another group dedicated to the same cause. If I were a more suspicious man, I’d suspect collusion between the fundamentalists of the Republican party and the fundamentalists of the Islamic religion – all aimed at taking us back to the Dark Ages, whatever the cost in human suffering.

What pains me today is an article I read about the effect of President Bush’s proud effort to restrain the out of control spending on Medicaid, whose budget for next year is roughly 196 billion dollars. This is a program that provides services to the mentally retarded, not a group with a strong lobbying presence in Washington these days. The bill takes specific aim at targeted case management, a way of coordinating services to citizens in need of multiple assists, who formerly had to negotiate on their own myriad governmental agencies and programs, on their own, provided they, or someone who loved them, could find those sources at all.

The President’s fancy new law, reduces by 20% the money set aside to help people in dire need of medical and psychological care, housing, jobs, education (for those educable to begin with) , parenting help – which I can tell you would have been of significant help to London Sherwood, who was removed from life support and died three months to the day after she was born. Her short life filled with pain, bleeding on her brain, fractures to her ribs and legs, at the hands of her 21 year old father, who was left in his charge by an overwhelmed and addicted mother. Or the 7 year old boy beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend for wetting the bed, or 6 month old suffocated by a drunken father who tried to still his child’s crying by holding a quilt over the child’s face. Nope, no need for parenting programs, we come biologically equipped to nurture our young. Don’t we? And we certainly don’t need no stinking government program to teach us nothing about THAT.

The Congress in its typical stalwart defense of the innocent, is trying to stay “execution” (and if that is not an APT word, I have never heard one) of Bush’s Draconian cuts to the only program we have that truly cares for those who cannot care for themselves. Because its costs are just out of control. Unlike, say, a war that will never produce a single “win” and for which we have happily thrown a trillion and a half dollars down the rabbit hole. Sometimes, the leadership in this country just makes me sick. This is one of those times. Pandering, spineless, pukes that they are, they on both sides who have allowed such a thing to happen. Who passed a law that is going to cause as much pain to as many people as possible, not quite as bloody as the war they rage on Iraqi’s but every bit as lethal. It is days like this that I wished I believed in Hell. :^( gene