"BUSH TO CHILDREN: DROP DEAD"

The title's an semi-obscure reference, but it's the first thing that came to mind when I read the latest on the President's continuing insistence that he will veto Congress' attempts to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Of course, at this point, it's not news when the President threatens to veto anything out of Congress... it's really news when/if he would just sign these bills that have popular support.

That news, however, is now coupled with this news-

The Bush administration, engaged in a battle with Congress over whether a popular children's health insurance program should be expanded, has announced new policies that will make it harder for states to insure all but the lowest-income children...

Stuff like this isn't surprising after all these years, but it remains frustrating.

The President signed every bill that came out of the GOP congress (with the one stem-cell exception), no matter how odious it was. And now he's in full-on stubborn mode, blocking almost everything the Democrats bring up. Is this because his rigid conservative ideology just meshed with all the crap from the last congress, but can't with these new legislative priorities? Or is he so bitterly partisan that the content of the bills matter less than which party proposed them? Personally, I believe it's 60% the latter, 40% the former.

Common political sense would say that a struggling lame-duck President who's seen all his domestic proposals crash and burn (privatizing social security, immigration reform) would re-embrace the center and try and craft out something legislatively he can claim as a legacy. But not The Decider. It's his way or the highway.

In regards to this particular issue, the official White House line is that the costs are just too high for the President to agree to. Yes, the same President who, with his GOP congress, achieved record levels of pork-barrel spending and deficits for the majority of his term. A real fiscal conservative! Not to mention, of course, all the billions (trillions?) poured into the quicksands of Iraq, because as blogger Jim Henley notes, the media and politicians view military spending as 'free' with no consequences in reality.

But that's the modern conservative mindset in a nutshell... they'll spend the country into bankruptcy fighting an endless war to protect their pride, but the health and prosperity of their own citizens should be left to the free market to decide. That's the mentality that has kids sucking on lead-painted toys. It's the mentality slowly destroying the Republican party's hold on American politics.

But don't tell President Bush that. He's not listening.