Bush Fiddles

Today at least twenty MORE people were killed in Iraq--although Iyad Allawi, who must be feeling more and more like Freidrich Paulus at Stalingrad every day--dutifully insisted that the elections would go ahead as planned--even though, as Oyster pointed out the other day, the insurgency now appears to outnumber the US forces in the country (for more on that, check out this BBC article).

The US, hanging on by its fingernails in Mesopotamia, is now getting shrill with Syria--again--although this smacks more of kicking your dog after a bad day at work.

There's of course the ongoing effort to assist areas hit by the tsunami--for the record, I'm guessing that anyone reading my humble blog knows where contributions are being accepted--and, if by chance you're not sure of a deserving agency, I'll note that Scaramouche has a prominent link that you can get to from his site (and please be generous to the extent that you can).

So, with all that's going on, you'd maybe think George W. Bush would be, oh, I don't know, doing almost ANYTHING BESIDES pushing his latest Adult A.D.D. fixation? Nope--here's the latest example of his "hard work":

Restating one of his campaign themes, President Bush prodded the new Congress today to put curbs on medical-malpractice lawsuits, which he said were driving up the cost of care and driving good doctors out of medicine.

Notwithstanding the fact that this ridiculous concept is ALREADY in place in either 27 or 34 states (competing articles here and here on the numbers), or that we're talking about 2 percent of overall healthcare costs, or that Bush was pulling facts out of his ass when he asserted that it was costing the country between "$60 and $100 billion a year" during his third debate with John Kerry last year, "tort reform" and "malpractice reform" are nothing if not a sleazy attempt to roll back basic rights--like the right to sue for damages if your healthcare provider screws up. And, considering that what we're talking about is NOT honest mistakes, but plain, good-old fashioned bungling by people who are PAID GOOD MONEY precisely BECAUSE we trust them literally with our lives--well, you know, come to think of it, maybe that IS the point: the person who dropped the ball on Iraq, on the economy, on the environment, on education, on--you name it--must see shades of himself in those who've made egregious errors on patients--just as he's done himself with the body politic.

Unfortunately, while Bush's compassion goes out to his constituency, fire is consuming everything else. But it's hard work for the dauphin to put his fiddle down.