They Don't Even Try To Be Logically Consistent

It's old news by now that the Republicans and their orc pit of bloggers have taken to attacking the families of kids who benefitted from SCHIP, the children's health insurance program that Congress wants to expand and that Bush has vetoed.

What's interesting about the latest attack is that it's directed against a family that lacked insurance but chose to have a child, anyway. The child had a serious heart condition that required expensive health care. (The mother had insurance years ago at a prior job, but quit when that job became "unmanageable" and has worked for years as a waitress at a restaurant that doesn't provide insurance.) The right wing slime machine is in high dudgeon over the notion that this family shouldn't have had kids if they didn't want to work at jobs that provide insurance.

Of course, the right wing also doesn't believe in family planning or birth control. What was this married couple supposed to do -- abstain from sex forever? What if they'd saved enough to pay for a normal hospital birth for a healthy child, but discovered, while the mother was still pregnant, that the child, when born, would have an expensive heart condition? An abortion at that point would be affordable, out of their savings, but they couldn't afford the health care. In the wingnut world, what should they have done? Remember, wingnuts hate abortion worst of all.

And, of course, there's no end to the "objections" the wingnuts can come up with when they presume to decide how other people should live their lives. What about people who have jobs that provide insurance, have a child, lose that job to "oursourcing" (it happens in George Bush's America) and then their child develops an expensive medical condition? Sure, we could go back and criticize some "choice" they made -- there was that year that they took the family to Disney Land instead of foreseeing that their child would develop cancer and need to be hospitalized for a month. If they'd invested that money in the stock market -- oh, wait.

In the end, it's all just nuts. We're the richest country on Earth. We can afford trillions of dollars for an war of aggression against a country that didn't attack us. Our wealthiest citizens pay ridiculously little in taxes. If we have money for that, we have money to provide health care for working families, people like waitresses and cabinetmakers. The notion that people should have to "choose" between working at the vanishingly few jobs that provide real health insurance and having a child or between owning a home and having a child or between being self-employed or having a child is just goofy. Well, no, it's more than just goofy. It's evil and pernicious and disgusting. I'm looking at you, Republican Party.