There Is No Cat

The new man on the moon

The New York Times has an article about how health insurance is becoming a luxury for those of us fools trapped in the middle class. Leaving aside the question of insurance, there was an interesting quote in the article (which I originally saw highlighted on Damien Barrett’s blog):

As for her own health, Ms. Johnston has two cysts in one breast and three in another but has had only one aspirated because she cannot afford to check on the others. "Do I have to move to Iraq to get help?" she asked. "They have $87 billion for folks over there," she said, referring to money Congress allocated for military operations and rebuilding.

I’m seeing this more and more often lately; people making the connection between government not being able to help Americans because of a lack of money and the huge amount of money that materialized from nowhere to send to Iraq. When I was growing up in th 1970s, when someone wanted to express exasperation about politicians’ sense of priorities, they said something along the lines of "we can send a man to the moon, but we can’t ______". It appears to me that the analogous construction for today is "we can spend $87 billion on Iraq, but we can’t _____".

If this mentality really takes hold, and it appears to me that it is, then Dubya is toast. Because this little construction shows that people are starting to make the connection between Dubya’s promiscuous military ways and their own pocketbooks.

Posted at 10:14 AM