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.

Et Tu, Denis?

Denis Kucinich, of all people, turns out to be one of the members of Congress who will have to change their votes if President Bush’s veto of the expanded children’s health insurance bill is to be overridden by the House of Representatives.

Kucinich voted for the original House-passed version of the bill because it included health coverage for legal immigrant children. When this language was omitted in the final bill, he voted no.

“I cannot support legislation which extends health coverage to some children while openly denying it to other children,” Kucinich said.

Rationalization is the prevailing mode for all politicians, but if you chop that sentence in half, Kucinich is saying the bill has to be perfect or else. Meanwhile, the most liberal or progressive or whatever of Democratic presidential candidates is achieving the same result as his presumably polar opposite, George Bush.

If you tell Kucinich that politics is the art of the possible, he will undoubtedly give you one of his idealistic speeches. Meanwhile he has voted to deprive several million children of health insurance.

Bush Makes Republicans French Toast

He did it this morning, without comment or news coverage, an act that proves George Bush to be, depending on your politics, either the most steadfast or stubborn, the most principled or heartless of American Presidents in memory.

But there is common agreement in Congress that, by vetoing the bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children's health insurance, a lame duck Head of State has committed the most politically selfish act since Louis XV proclaimed, “Apres moi, le deluge” before the French Revolution.

Now Congressional Republicans, facing a guillotine at the ballot box in 2008, are scrambling to limit the damage. Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott talks bravely about a “compromise” with an Administration that takes no prisoners.

The Senate has enough votes to override, but House Minority Whip Roy Blunt is "absolutely confident" that the House will be able to sustain Bush's veto as Democrats keep trying to convince more than a dozen members on the other side of the aisle to switch their position.

If not, Nancy Pelosi can start practicing her knitting for the role of Madame DeFarge, as Republican incumbents go by on their way to the tumbrel in the George Bush revival of “A Tale of Two Cities” next fall.

Bush-Hunting Season Opens

Next week the President officially becomes a lame duck. One of his staunchest Senate supporters, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, has turned on the issue of children’s health insurance and is actively fighting to defeat him.

“We’re going to try [to] convince people in the House to change their vote,” he said yesterday. “All I can do is make phone calls.”

Not quite “Here I stand, I can do no other,” but 18 Senate Republicans defected from Bush dogma yesterday by voting for the State Children’s Health Insurance Bill the President has promised to veto.

The 67-29 margin would override it, and two Democratic Presidential candidates, Obama and Biden, were not even there. The question now is whether another dozen House Republicans will join the 45 who broke ranks the other day.

The President who lost the popular vote by more than half a million in November 2000 but won the Supreme Court by 5-4 in December has translated that mandate into almost seven years of domination in Washington, but now servile Republicans in Congress are facing extinction next year if they persist in their fealty.

Under cover of Gen. Petraeus, they may hold out over Iraq, but denying children health coverage is quite another matter. The White House may compromise, but they have no experience at it.

Childrens do learn. Do Presidents?