The Rest of the Story

From the Great and Powerful Kos, the real reason for the Republican jihad against SCHIP (culminating in their embarrassing attacks against a 12 year old boy and his family): they fear, as with Hillarycare in '93, that success will remind middle-class voters that they have far more in common with the working poor than they do with the economic aristocracy the GOP supports. One of the linchpins of Republican electoral strategy since Reagan has been to make "entitlement" a dirty word and associate any form of government assistance with welfare queens and other undesirables. If even some of the large numbers of uninsured middle class families start seeing things otherwise, then the whole "government is the problem" argument falls apart.

UPDATE: Mitch McConnell beats up children. And he blatantly lied about it. Yes, I know; not much of a surprise, but it tends to fit in well with the above theory.

Conservative Hypocrisy Watch

I could probably do an entire separate blog on this topic alone. In our latest installment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, an odious little man previously known for fighting tooth-and-nail against anything even remotely resembling campaign finance reform, has now apparently learned how to stop worrying and love the filibuster. Same goes for James Inhofe, a right-wing troglodyte from Oklahoma, who now threatens to deploy the F-Bomb against any efforts to reduce global warming. Inhofe previously was known for trying to gut Indian sovereignty in order to prevent tribes from protecting the environment.

UPDATE: Senator John Warner of Virginia, whose thinking has actually left the Middle Ages, leapt the Renaissance and reached the Enlightenment, will challenge crackpot James Inhofe for the post of Ranking Member on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Good on him.