Political Disgust

If you’ve been following along for any length of time, you know that I often write about politics. You’ll also note that I haven’t said too much about that lately, and the reason is because I’m disgusted beyond words. “Why?” you may be asking yourself, well, for one thing, it’s about this tsunami disaster. Besides the fact that this resulted in over 150,000 people losing their lives, Our Employee’s reaction was, once again, a national embarrassment. If nothing else, he’s at least a consistent boob. Not only did he NOT want to leave the ranch in Crawford, thus interrupting his Christmas vacation and interfering with his comfortable life, his first offer of assistance to the victims of this disaster was a measly $15 million. Naturally, the rest of the world looked at this as stingy in the extreme. The tsunami catastrophe may well be the worst natural disaster in human history, but of course, Shrub didn’t want to believe it. When it finally began to dawn on him that, hey, this might actually be serious, he increased the aid to $35 million. At which point, the rest of the world laughed at us, so then he upped it to $350 million, and then got his father and former President Clinton to spearhead the private donation efforts for disaster relief.

We apparently have plenty of money, we spend around $270 million a day for the war in Iraq. Bush gave almost $13.6 billion (yes, that is billion) to disaster relief efforts in Florida after the four hurricanes, but then again, his brother is the governor and it was an election year after all. And Bush has $40-$50 million to spend on his Inauguration Ball (there are actually 9 balls), which is much more than his initial offer of disaster relief. Are you disgusted yet?

With *just* the money that’s being spent on the inauguration… what could you buy?

- Two hundred supremely armored Humvees for troops in Iraq.
- Vaccinations and preventive health care for 22 million children in regions devastated by the tsunami.
- A down payment on the nation’s deficit, which hit a record-breaking $412 billion last year.

Funds for healthcare, funds for pharmaceutical drugs (how about those flu shots?), funds for firefighters and first responders, and the unfunded No Child Left Behind Act… and if I sat here, thinking about all of the great things his “party money” could do, I’m sure I could come up with a list the length of my arm without too much effort.

Disgust? You betcha.