Child Health Veto Will Be Election Issue
What Happened to Compassionate Conservatism?
SCHIP: 41 Days, 10 million Reasons, and President Bush’s Priorities
WASHINGTON ‚Äö√Ñ√Æ President Bush cast a quiet veto Wednesday against a politically attractive expansion of children’s health insurance, triggering a struggle with the Democratic-controlled Congress certain to reverberate into the 2008 elections…. “Congress will fight hard to override President Bush’s heartless veto,” vowed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Republican leaders expressed confidence they have enough votes to make the veto stick in the House, and not a single senior Democrat disputed them. A two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress is required to override a veto. Bush vetoed the bill in private, absent the television cameras and other media coverage that normally attend even routine presidential actions. The measure called for adding an estimated four million mostly lower-income children to a program that currently covers 6.6 million. Funds for the expansion would come from higher tobacco taxes, including a 61-cent increase on a pack of cigarettes.
Is there anything that says “(&^% you” to our nation’s children more effectively than Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader’s © veto of SCHIP? Well, besides asking for yet more billions for his Glorious Adventure in Iraq © ? Interesting, isn’t it, that while he can claim that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of insuring children, he can claim with a straight face that it should be in the business of killing them?
This is a President who has no problem with using children as a political backdrop when it serves his purpose, but when that’s not the case, he’s just as likely to tell them to kiss off, which this veto certainly does. The evidence for this is in the quiet, cowardly way in which he vetoed the bill. Absent the hoopla and media folderol that normally occurs at similar Presidential actions, The Worst President EVER wielded his veto pen quietly , away from prying reporters and their intrusive cameras and questions.
If you ever need to understand why “Compassionate Conservatism” is such an awful, cynical oxymoron, you need look no farther than this gutless President and his veto of SCHIP. If this isn’t the personification of Evil and self-interested political calculation at work, I don’t know what is.
