Truman's Conscience

Welcome To The Bush Banana Republic of Florida

Now days when I think of my home state it’s not hard to think “Banana Republic.” While the rest of the country suffers the infirmities of one Bush, we here in the Sunshine State get an added burden of two. So be it. Befalling cruel fates seems to have taken on an art form here in the Union’s 27th state. Hence, the Bush brothers and their version of the Brothers Grimm as they orchestrate the subjugation of the political process with a surreal, dark, fairy-tale like quality that only Jacob and Wilhelm could appreciate.

Yesterday, in a New York Times editorial, (with a hat tip to Daily Kos’ Armando) we find the mainstream media suddenly beginning to suffer the aftereffects of a long, deep hibernation like sleep and waking up to the realization they’ve been had:

“We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.”

Well, nice to see the New York Times finally taking part in the reality based community they are supposed to be serving and listing the lies, one after another, this administration has perpetrated on the electorate that is supposed to have elected him. Here in Florida, we still can’t find the votes that made him President and yet he has served his term to date without so much as one mainstream press outlet (with the possible exception of Knight-Ridder) questioning his raison d’etre as he continues to act out his part in a very bad Faustian play. At this point, even the devil feels cheated.

Then there is the brother and his part in this lurid Grimm exercise. The intricate dance they step to has one underlying common theme: anathema to a socially responsible government, whether it is on the state or federal level. While the faux Crawford native demonstrated this abhorrence through his inaction pre and post Katrina, the Governor had the state’s Medicaid and DCF programs with which to stage his:

“TAMPA - Florida Medicaid mistakenly dropped about 15,000 low-income cancer and transplant patients from a drug-subsidy program six weeks ago, the Agency for Health Care Administration said Friday.
AHCA sent notices to pharmacies statewide Friday afternoon saying Medicaid will immediately resume paying the 20 percent "co-insurance" for anticancer and transplant drugs that has been denied since Jan. 1, when the Medicare prescription drug plan was launched. The state said it will reimburse patients and pharmacies.”

What a nice touch. If this is their version of “compassionate conservatism” then I shudder at the thought of their definition of cold indifference. They are now going to each get 8 years to make the ineffectiveness of socially responsible government axiomatic. Except there is one slight problem: the track record of government in the hands of socially responsible custodians. From Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, socially responsible government has a track record that is undeniable. A mainstream media that is complicit in this attempt at ideological white-out in order to prove government ineffectiveness has the added irony of demonstrating the ineffectiveness of their social responsibility when it comes to the public they are supposed to be serving.
When you send people to Washington and/or their state capitols that detest and publicly demean public service one should not be surprised when the system becomes corrupted and fraught with incompetence. My question and fear is once both of their 8 years are up will it be too late to save us? One can only hope not.