Hope you had a great summer. If so, you had it better than the poor, or troubled kids, in Nebraska.
First, it should be becoming obvious to us all that, given the reins of power, Republicans will do mean, spiteful and dangerous things to our country and its citizens. The Tea Party has become, for the Grand Old Party, mainstream.
Or, more accurately, meanstream.
Their problem, of course, is that their dogma is more important than the dogma’s effects. For instance, Michelle Bachman opined: "To have innocent little 12 year old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong. That should never be done. That's a violation of a liberty interest." That “government injection” is one that prevents cervical cancer. We note that Ms Bachman’s initial reaction to the idea was not that injections are dangerous medicine; it was that they’re wrong if the government is behind them. The question of their effectiveness is not the issue; the issue is the dogma that the government should not do anything.
So in Nebraska, we have a child welfare safety net collapsing around our ears, all because Gov. Heineman has embraced the Republican dogma that “privatization saves money with no loss of efficiency”.
State senators Heath Melo and Jeremy Nordquist would like an inquiry into how the foster care privatization fiasco came about, including what other areas the Department of Health and Human Services “ are suffering” because DHHS “found” money to staunch the bleeding foster care wound.
They might try looking at Family Assistance – you know, Medicaid, food stamps and the like. There, experienced workers are being laid off, and what used to be casework has been changed to data entry. More on that in another column, so we’ll leave it that it’s a in the name of saving money, and certainly not in the interest of service to the people supposedly being served.
But that’s all consistent with Republican dogma, as famously blurted out by famous Republican Jon Bruning, who famously compared poor people to scavenging raccoons. And perhaps Mr. Bruning is a friend of Republican Kansas state legislator Virgil Peck, who wants to hunt undocumented aliens “like wild hogs”. Or the Arizona Republicans who are making a stand against the greatest, most imminent threat facing America: human-animal hybrid cloning.
Considering someone an animal is nothing new, of course; running, or governing, on the basis or treating people like animals surely is, at least in America.
Also unprecedented in the nationwide Republican war on the poor. What is the point of a study, by a conservative think tank, that concludes that the poor aren’t so bad off because they have refrigerators? That they’re not as badly off as, say, people living in tent cities in Sudan or Somalia? That we should wait until they’re that poor before worrying about them? That we should confiscate their refrigerators rather than raise taxes on the rich? (Answer: Yes, that is precisely the point).
And while Republicans attack the most vulnerable in society, they are also attacking the way democracy works. It’s not
enough for Nebraska Republicans that they gerrymandered the 2nd district to make it all but impossible for a Democrat to win anything in it; they have now made it their number one priority to eliminate the possibility a President Obama winning an electoral vote in Nebraska. Are they saying “We know our ideas stink, so we’re going to just bully our way to victory”? Or are they saying “We’re too inept to come up with ideas good enough to attract voters”?
Maybe that’s a question for their own cancer-ignoring, child welfare privatizing, raccoon-hog-human hybrid, refrigerator-hoarding elected officials to answer.
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