Not Putting Their Money Where Terri Schiavo's Mouth Is
With last night's hasty congressional vote accompanied by President Bush's interrupting his vacation (SPRING BREAK CRAWFORD!!!- since when did presidents get a spring vacation anyway?) to sign a law that would bring the Terri Schiavo case into federal court, Terri Schiavo has become the official cause celebre for the right-to-life movement. Although the thought of starving someone in a vegetative state to death is shocking and gruesome, this is basically what the so-called pro-life agenda's party, the GOP, is advocating on a much broader scale. While Christian conservatives keep round-the-clock vigils outside Ms. Schiavo's hospice and twist congressional arms to do whatever possible to re-insert her feeding tube, including passing a law that is an unprecedented federal intrusion into the rights of states, it seems as if no one has noticed where the money to pay for Ms. Schiavo's intravenous substinance is coming from. Well, I'll tell you. Terri Schiavo's medicine for the past two years has been paid for that lynchpin of the US welfare state, Medicaid. For those who aren't aware, Medicaid has been in the crosshairs of the Bush Administration for the past two years, and Bush's proposed cuts would come cause 1.2 million cildren to lose Medicaid coverage over the next five years if aproved by congress (as reported in the Christian Science Monitor). The rest of Ms. Schiavo's medical expenses are covered by the Hospice (which provides free service) and two malpractice lawsuits Ms. Schiavo won in 1990 totaling arond $1 million. Again, the irony cannot be more tragic. The Bush administration has also been pushing to limit medical liability lawsuit recoveries for people just like Ms. Schiavo, who have been permanently damaged by bad doctors. In the typical twisted-but-brilliant political manuvering of the Republican party, again the Democrats have turned out looking like heartless death-mongerers, while the Republicans have been portrayed as compassionate souls defending a sick woman, while in reality if the republicans have their way, thousands of Terri Schiavos will starve to death in the hospices, hospitals, and streets of America for years to come.
posted by Rich at 5:06 PM
3 Comments:
Another piece of Hypocracy- when Bush was Governor of Texas, he signed a law that allows hospitals to remove feeding tubes from six-month-old babies in vegatative states AGAINST THE WISHES OF THE PARENTS IF THE FAMILY COULDN"T AFFORD TO PAY FOR THE CONTINUED USE OF THE TUBE.
The Terri Schiavo piece exposes a divide in the GOP- it seems incongruent for free market/limited government conservatives to align with social conservatives that clearly have no compunction about using government to impose their values/conceptions of the good on others..It is equally strange (and I take this from your point about the Bush Admin. slashing Medicare) that the social conservatives would consort with people who clearly believe that the State has no interest/responsibility in providing medical care..strange bedfellows indeed...It's a divide the Democrats must exploit but the question is- which group do we embrace??
Sean, I couldn't agree more. It seems that to have a majority party in America, there needs to be strange bedfellows, and the history of American politics seems to be cycles of the minority party splitting the bedfellows of the majority party, thus becoming the majority, only to be split again by that minority, and on and on. The republicans did this so effectively to the democrats in the 60's and 70's when they realized that the southern conservative democrats and white working class union democrats were strange bedfellows with the urban minority/ northeast liberal wing of the party that was pushing the civil rights legislation and protesting the Vietnam War. The repubs divided us along racial and ethnic lines, and that worked until the 90's, when most Americans stopped being overtly racist. Thus they needed a new strategy without using race, so they continued the roughly same demographic divide, but instead with the issues of gay rights and defense to keep the white working class, and tax cuts for their real base, the socially indifferent, Montgomery Burns types. Really, both of these groups SHOULD be in the democrtic tent- democratic policies have much greater value assets in terms of caring for the poor, and last time I checked, wealthy people did a whole lot better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. But since truly greedy wealthy Republicans will never believe that Democrats serve their interests because they will make more despite being taxed more, it seems more natural that the white working class socially conservative voters is the group likely to go democrat- after all, they were the founders of the modern Democratic party, and I think the Democrats would be wise to run socially conservative Democrats in states that socially liberal democrats can't win. It's better to have a William Jennings Bryan Democrat than a Tom Coburn Republican in the Senate any day. But the honest truth is that more white working class people vote republican because of defense than social issues. In large swaths of America, being a Democrat is just not "manly." Becoming the party of defense whoud not be hard for Democrats- in fact, it is what they originally were while they were the majority party- Democratic presidents won both World Wars, and were percieved superior to republicans until Lyndon Johnson, and equal to Republicans until Jimmy Carter. This doesn't mean Democrats should be foolhardy on defense, like President Bush. But just about everyone can agree to a "kill the bastards" policy towards terrorists, yet the democrats do a horrible job of articulating it. The Dems need to get over the Vietnam War and have a real face-to-face with the niave hippy wing of the party that has allowed the whole party to be painted as them. If the Dems can't shake that image, we are forever doomed to be the victim of strange bedfellows.
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