Life, Love, and Liberty

Tells it like it is:

First of all, I’m just amazed they can’t figure out, the Republicans are worried we 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 ya gonna get that money? 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 or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we 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. This bill would provide healthcare for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care. [...]

But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.

Of course, this kind of reality check is not welcomed by everyone in the allegedly “anti- Iraq War” Congress, so Nancy Pelosi had to step in to offer the following:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rebuked a fellow San Francisco Bay-area liberal Friday for what she said were “inappropriate” comments about Iraq during a congressional debate.
During a debate on children’s health care Thursday, Rep. Pete Stark accused Republicans of sending troops to Iraq to “get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Condemnations rolled in from Republican politicians, right-leaning bloggers had a field day, and a White House spokesman declined to “dignify those remarks” with a response.

Pelosi issued a statement Friday evening rapping Stark, who is in his 18th term representing the liberal East Bay. He’s California’s longest-serving House members.

“While members of Congress are passionate about their views, what Congressman Stark said during the debate was inappropriate and distracted from the seriousness of the subject at hand—providing health care for America’s children,” Pelosi said.

I don’t think there are adequate words in the English language to describe how angry I am with the Democrats in Congress. They are complete partisans of the imperial project with only a few notable exceptions. And people will go to the polls in 2008 with the intent of voting for Clinton or Obama, or whichever militaristic candidate — and I’ll be pretty shocked if somebody like Kucinich gets it — gets the nomination. They will expect some kind of end to the slaughter and they will be entirely going about it the wrong way.

To any Democratic friends of peace reading this, please don’t vote at all, or if you must try to elect a Democrat, then choose somebody like Kucinich who has admirably stood up to the warfare state like virtually no other members of Congress have.

To the left-libertarians reading this, I know the guy is advocating government health insurance rather than something delightfully anarchistic like mutual aid societies combined with systemic overhaul, but he does let the Republicans know that being opposed to big government spending also means not starting trillion dollar wars.

And I do believe that stolen money is better spent insuring sick children living in the context of a statist tainted healthcare market rather than on killing Iraqis.

Compliments to the fiery Chris Floyd for alerting me to this story.

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