Conservatives Are Such Jokers

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In 1960, John F. Kennedy, who had been shocked by the hunger he saw in West Virginia, made the fight against hunger a theme of his presidential campaign. After his election he created the modern food stamp program, which today helps millions of Americans get enough to eat.

But Ronald Reagan thought the issue of hunger in the world’s richest nation was nothing but a big joke. Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Today’s leading conservatives are Reagan’s heirs. If you’re poor, if you don’t have health insurance, if you’re sick — well, they don’t think it’s a serious issue. In fact, they think it’s funny.

Get the full column here in the New York Times.

Or, as Rachael Maddow points out to Pat Buchanan:

MADDOW: The reason that [Bush] he‘s standing up against this program is because this is a phenomenally successful program that is socialized medicine, in the same way that Medicare is socialized medicine and Medicaid is socialized medicine, in the sense that the government helps out in a market that‘s broken.

That‘s incredibly dangerous to the Republican world view that government can never help.

BUCHANAN: Why don‘t you let…

MADDOW: So, they have got to shut down this working program, so they can continue to say that government is the problem.

Find that critique of the veto here.

My comment: Given that the President and the members of Congress get federal health care for life, if "socialized medicine" is such a mistake, maybe they should do without their health care plans. Maybe they should be paying for it out of their own pockets.

It would seem that "family values" means if your poor, if your sick, screw you ... and your children, too.