High Noon for S-CHIP

In the President’s favorite movie, the righteous hero stands alone and guns down the bad guys. Bush has played Gary Cooper in the showdowns over Iraq, and now he is facing down the villains in the S-CHIP fight.

But Bush has modeled himself on the wrong 1950s western. True to Washington and Hollywood, “High Noon” is more about pride and calculation than humanity. Those who care about people rather than power have always preferred “Shane.”

At the end of “High Noon,” the hero, after gunning down the bad guys, converting his Quaker wife to killing and showing his contempt for everyone else, rides off with Grace Kelly to some Olympus denied other mortals, all as a reward for his concept of manhood.

In “Shane,” a retired gunfighter reluctantly takes up arms again to protect a family he loves and their hard-working community against ruthless power. His reward is to ride off to die, alone.

That’s a concept that the man who the former President of Mexico calls a “windshield cowboy” fails to understand. (In his memoirs, Vincente Fox recounts Bush’s skittishness about getting on a horse, preferring to drive a pickup truck instead.)

This time Bush is playing cowboy with the health and lives of millions of children. Senate Democrats are trying to round up enough Republicans to override his veto in tomorrow’s vote, but the First Moviegoer is sticking to his guns.

It may be too late to stop Bush’s acting out of old oaters, but those who have to belly up to the ballot box next year should think hard about the consequences of the shootout.

Roaring Twenties in Iraq

It’s beginning to look like those old gangster movies in Baghdad with Moktada al-Sadr playing Little Caesar.

Instead of selling bootleg booze, his machine gun-toting henchmen are distributing food, medicine and fuel to the locals while collecting protection money, about $4 a monthly, from residents.

Gang killings are routine, with Sunni bodies piled up at neighborhood boundaries to discourage incursions by rival outfits.

With the U.S.-backed central government as impotent as our 1920s Feds were to enforce Prohibition, outlaws are fighting it out while terrorizing the population.

Our gangster nightmare ended with the repeal of Prohibition when lawmakers realized they were engaged in a futile enterprise. Maybe Bush and Cheney should stop watching “High Noon” and study those Edward G. Robinson flicks.