What Compassion?

What Compassion

Now we have Eric Cantor, who is obviously campaigning to remove Congressman Boerner as Speaker of the House, declaring that before federal money is spent to help the thousands affected by Hurricane Irene, we must find savings elsewhere.

He mindlessly uses the example that if a family has a crisis, they must take from other funds to deal with it. To accept this logic, you must compare a 320 million nation to a family of five.

That comparison does not work. It is simply madness.

So, the flooded millions in New Jersey and even Cantor's Virginia, must wait for federal aid, because we must look at which federal cookie jar to raid, like Medicare for example, or how about veterans' benefits? Oh I know, less bullets for the troops.

This reminds me of the good ole Hoover Days, when Hoover famously was asked about people selling apples on street corners in desperate attempts to make enough money to eat. He got all excited and proclaimed how this was capitalism at its finest, leaving out the starvation part.

Cantor's bright idea, is conservatism at its lowest; again blaming the victims for the disaster, and low balling assistance. This reminds us of Katrina, when Bush famously ignored thousands dying for days, because they were .....black!

Of course Bush was merely following Cantor's idealism, having blown trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan and mindlessly enacting a huge tax cut. Is this why aid was so late in getting to New Orleans, because the federal government had to shift money around?

Let's follow the logic. The federal government was broke in 1941, the depression was still on, the world was a war. So, before we aided Britain and Russia we should have shifted money from other areas, and failing that, not aided them at all. And, we would be speaking Japanese and German right now.

Look, if we need a debate about federal spending fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But you don't hold a debate about federal spending by using the threat of not funding disaster relief until you cut spending in other areas. Or, you don't use the leverage of natal disasters to enact spending cuts in unrelated federal projects.

This again, is bargaining through extortion. Cantor knows that nobody is going to freeze federal help for Hurricane victims, but he is USING this for political advantage.

We have never done that before in American Politics.

We used to have compassion for victims of natural disasters; now we use them for political gain. This is wrong, and despicable!