A Stitch in Haste

Paul Krugman on the SCHIP veto (netting out his typical bait-and-switch, guilt-by association background noise -- e.g., extraneous references to the Rush Limbaugh / Michael J. Fox affair):

Most conservatives ... try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren't bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don't think it's a problem.
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And on the day of the veto, Mr. Bush dismissed the whole issue of uninsured children as a media myth. Referring to Medicaid spending -- which fails to reach many children -- he declared that "when they say, well, poor children aren't being covered in America, if that's what you're hearing on your TV screens, I'm telling you there's $35.5 billion worth of reasons not to believe that."
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Of course, minimizing and mocking the suffering of others is a natural strategy for political figures who advocate lower taxes on the rich and less help for the poor and unlucky.

Two hasty stitches:

--If Medicaid, which is specifically designed to provide health care to the poor, is not adequately reaching poor children, then isn't the answer to fix Medicaid rather than to create (or expand) a whole new entitlement that is clearly capable -- and perhaps surreptitiously intended -- to undergo mission creep into the middle class? How is arguing that programs to help the poor should only help the poor, and not be wastefully duplicated, constitute "they aren't bothered by the fact" or "they don't think it's a problem" or "minimizing and mocking"?

--Do radical tax-and-spend liberals ever acknowledge the ignoble symmetry between being manically, fanatically willing to spend other people's money (which they call "compassion") and being manically, fanatically unwilling to spend your own (which they call "greed")? The difference between the two is not a chasm; it's a hairline fracture. How do they legitimize their sweeping indignation to those who are just tails to their heads? I don't get how they don't get it.

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Eugene Robinson grabs Krugman's baton and runs with it:

To say that George W. Bush spends money like a drunken sailor is to insult every gin-soaked patron of every dockside dive in every dubious port of call.
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So for Bush to get religion on fiscal responsibility at this late date is, well, a joke. And for him to make his stand on a measure that would have provided health insurance to needy children is a punch line that hasn't left many Republicans laughing.

All true (well almost: I strenuously object to Robinson's lumping the unarguably proper war in Afghanistan in with the discredited war in Iraq as a unified example of fiscal profligacy or misplaced priorities -- that's just sloppy thinking at best and disingenuous propagandizing at worst).

But it is at least as true that fiscal recklessness will be at least as bad starting in January 2009 when we have a Democratic president, Democratic House and Democratic Senate (and perhaps -- ministers of grace defend us -- a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate). Heckuva job, Craigy!

The answer to Republican Drunken Sailor Syndrome is not Democratic Drunken Sailor Syndrome. The answer, in the absence of libertarian principles (which are indeed absent in Washington), is gridlock.

And that answer is not forthcoming.