Preserve & Protect

Two parallel scandals, in Austin and Washington, DC, illustrate how the Republican philosophy of Social Darwinism inevitably leads to criminal neglect of at least two segments of society whose protection should be our top priority: children and veterans. In Washington, the despicable treatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed is merely the tip of the iceberg, a mere symptom of the Bush Administration's delusion that Iraq would be a "splendid little war." True, the Secretary of the Army has been thrown under the Congressional bus, but it's not just Walter Reed--the VA is riddled with bureaucratic idiocy and indifference.
Meanwhile, in Austin, the Texas Youth Commission stands revealed as a chamber of horrors, where pedophile guards are protected and the State is shielded against any meaningful civil liability for the callousness that allowed it all to happen.
Under what passes for conservative "thinking" these days, the weak are to be despised. Any suffering they bear is their own fault, God's judgment against them for moral failure. This must be true, because the reverse (the wealthy are clearly wealthy solely because God has shown them favor) is the cornerstone of the unholy blasphemous union between Right-Wing Christianity and Right-Wing Crony Capitalism. Wounded veterans of the Iraq Debacle must be hidden from view, for they are living reminders that the Dear Leader is, in fact, a mere mortal. Besides, Walter Reed might shine an uncomfortable light on the GOP mania for privatization, a mania that is also implicated in the TYC scandal. And children, whether they are the uninsured children of working families or juvenile offenders in custody, can be ignored because the sins of the parents are the sins of the children. Besides, children don't vote and they don't donate money to candidates. These scandals should come as a surprise to no one; they are the inevitable result of the anti-Christian, un-American economic philosophy that undergirds the modern Republic Party: money talks.