So, on the eve of what’s predicted to be a potential epidemic of swine flu, increasing unemployment, rising numbers of uninsured, underinsured and medical bankruptcies, Bill Kristol has pissy-pants over the fact that Obama didn’t call Congress together to go to war.
So President Obama invited himself into our living rooms tonight…why? Not to address questions of war and peace—even though we are fighting two wars overseas, and even though an avowed enemy and terror sponsor is rushing towards nuclear weapons. Not to address the economy—even though unemployment continues to rise, the deficit is at an all-time high, and we face a truly worrisome debt burden in the years ahead. And not to rally the nation in the face of some other crisis.
But isn’t health care a crisis? No.
Indeed, the president acknowledged it isn’t: “But we did not come here just to clean up crises. We came to build a future. So tonight, I return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future—and that is the issue of health care.” In other words, health care—unlike, say, the financial system a few months ago—is not in a state of crisis.
Besides the fact that Bill Kristol cannot read, and cannot understand the simple idea that we don’t just mop things up but build systems to ensure the problem doesn’t happen again, it strikes me as…let’s say ironic that a man who vehemently supported a war of choice in a sovereign nation when we were already fighting another war thinks he has room to lecture other people on what is and isn’t a crisis. The population of Iraq is around 28,000,000. The population of uninsured and underinsured Americans is at least twice that. The idea that those Americans may die early and in destitution from a wholly preventable phenomenon that almost every other major industrialized country on Earth dealt with decades ago isn’t a crisis, but failing to find Saddam Hussein eating Doritos in a hole could have very well killed all of your babies twice over.
It’s truly telling what Republicans think constitutes a crisis and what they think doesn’t. It’s a wholly selfish paradigm, which has less to do with actual problems than what they wake up at night sweating over - thus explaining why gay sex and being nuked seem to be the recurring number one and two problems in the world.
In related news, there’s a new round of vapors befalling conservative bloggers because someone moaned loudly when Bush lied about Social Security. These two things are equivalent, because they fucking are, and really, Code Pink! Thus, guns at rallies. For all the talk of how 2010 may be a Republican year, it’s going to be harder when at least 75% of Republican events will result in the candidates awkwardly not-quite-denying that our Black Muslim President’s Czars keep abducting people and anally probing them for homosexual research, and the entire Republican dialogue, from Kristol down to the nutjob with the “Obama Should Pick Watermelons, Not My Doctor” sign is based in transparently false, otherwise inscrutable code words about birth certificates, abortion and granny-killing.
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He doesn’t even consider that the fact that children grow up with ailments that prevent them from eventually enlisting in the armed services has historically been an issue for the military.
That’s why we have the school lunch program. It should be Yet Another Reason we have have cradle to grave health care.