[From today’s NY Times]
The Mask Comes Off
By Bob Herbert
Is this what the electorate wanted?
Did Americans really want a president who would smile in the faces of poor children even as he was scheming to cut their benefits? Did they want a man who would fight like crazy for enormous tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting funds for programs to help abused and neglected kids?
Is that who George W. Bush turned out to be?
An article by The Times's Robert Pear disclosed last week that President Bush will propose cuts in the already modest funding for child-care assistance for low-income families. And he will propose cuts in funding for programs designed to investigate and combat child abuse. And he wants cuts in an important new program to train pediatricians and other doctors at children's hospitals across the U.S.
The cuts are indefensible, unconscionable. If implemented, they will hurt many children.
The president also plans to cut off all of the money provided by Congress for an "early learning" trust fund, which is an effort to improve the quality of child care and education for children under 5.
What's going on?
That snickering you hear is the sound of Mr. Bush recalling the great fun he had playing his little joke on the public during the presidential campaign. He presented himself as a different kind of Republican, a friend to the downtrodden, especially children. ...
The simple truth is that the oversized tax cuts and Mr. Bush's devotion to the ideologues and the well-heeled special interests that backed his campaign are playing havoc with the real-world interests not just of children, but of most ordinary Americans.
Mr. Bush is presiding over a right-wing juggernaut that has already reneged on his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions (an important step in the fight against global warming); that has repealed a set of workplace safety rules that were designed to protect tens of millions of Americans but were opposed as too onerous by business groups; that has withdrawn new regulations requiring a substantial reduction in the permissible levels of arsenic, a known carcinogen, in drinking water; and that has (to the loud cheers of the most conservative elements in the G.O.P.) ended the American Bar Association's half-century-old advisory role in the selection of federal judges, thus making it easier to appoint judges with extreme right-wing sensibilities.
The administration of George W. Bush, in the words of the delighted Edwin J. Feulner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, is "more Reaganite than the Reagan administration."
[Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/26/opinion/26HERB.html]
As for the Democrats: Still dead.
Carl
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