I don’t have any: associates, friends or relatives who are Republicans, who voted for George Bush or for any Republican. When my Tampa Bay partner’s step-daughter got married 18 months ago in Atlanta I refused to attend. The family was staunchly GOP. Consider my position extreme. (I don’t even own any red-colored apparel!)
But for me it was a matter of principle: No it is not just a difference of political opinion when more than a couple million have had their lives shredded and, for an included uncountable number, their bodies dismembered or lives ended by a president and party hell bent on creating a hell on earth while to hell whatever the financial cost to future generations might be. I don’t give a damn how often someone attends church services, whether they say grace before dinner or prayers before bed. As far as I’m concerned, no volume of pious pontifications heavenward can perfume over the stench of the foul sins these hypocrites have engaged.
So, I have no such pariahs to contend with. Rather, regardless that I’m an atheist, I borrow the advice of Jesus of Nazareth: I show them the dust of my sandals. Nonetheless others may not, others may, for any number of reasons I cannot reconcile with the most remote Christian doctrine, in fact tolerate these miserable miscreants in their midst, thereby becoming themselves either accessories to the fact, or after it. I’m not making any claim to be pure or the least bit more pure than those who hang onto family and what they prefer to call friends. No, I’m just damned angry.
And a goodly part of what angers me so is the Orwellian/Goebbelian turn of the Big Lie into so readily accepted TRUTH by so many in our country. Example: even the most cursory perusal of facts demonstrate that Ronald Reagan was an abject failure as a president. Yet the GOP spin machine transformed him into a near god, with his funeral a beatification ceremony an Egyptian pharaoh would have envied.
Say it loud enough and sufficiently frequently and voila, IT’S THE TRUTH REVEALED! It doesn’t matter that the “truth” may be 180 degrees removed. Just say it loud and often.
Now George Bush has vetoed the SCHIP bill that would have provided nine million children, now without access to health care, access to health care.
Compassionate George and a few of his legislator supporters squawk “creeping socialized medicine!” That logic would prevent any non-private entity from supplying water to someone dying of dehydration on the premise the poor soul might become dependent on government-provided water, or that he might elect government water over corporate bottled in the future.
Parenthetically, without the parentheses, our present private insurance healthcare delivery system hasn’t done an especially fine job of delivering healthcare. Relative to the healthcare delivery systems of the nations of the earth, the US ranks 41 for longevity of its citizens. In fact, the only indicator where we rank Number 1 is in cost. No one spends close to what we do. Oh, Switzerland does.
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