We are not amused?

Not much I can add to this post, either.

from the courier-journal.com (Louisville, KY):

Hold firm for kids

The House vote that failed to override President Bush's veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was a real test of values.

In siding with the President and against millions of kids, the House Republicans -- including Kentuckians Ron Lewis, Geoff Davis, Ed Whitfield and Hal Rogers -- hid behind patently false claims that the bill to expand SCHIP was a move toward socialized medicine. The measure was an effort to meet real human need, not a sneaky way to establish another federal entitlement for the middle class...

If the differences in values between the two major political parties are real, as Democrats claim, this is an issue with which they can demonstrate it, with stunning clarity.

Republicans will approve endless sums of taxpayer money to conduct war, yet GOP opponents of the SCHIP bill parrot the White House claim that it is too costly. They say nothing about the social costs, and ultimately the public burdens, that are created by denying millions of children regular access to decent health care...

If the House Democrats are who they claim to be, they won't let George W. Bush push them, and needy children, around on this issue.

Hard to add to that.

Indeed. This is essentially what Rep. Pete Stark said. Granted, he may have stepped over the bounds of propriety, but that was the message. The Republican's fake outrage over his statement on the floor of the House is largely a measure to discredit that message. Yet, thankfully, there are some who get it and won't let the faux outrage become the distraction that the Republicans want it to be.

However, aside from the fact that, yet again, the Democrats have been all too easily taken off message by Republican faux-outrage, I would like to focus on an aspect that has not, to my knowledge, been covered in this thread.

The administration has repeatedly tried to provide rationale for the War in Iraq: WMD, links to 9/11, Iraqi political reconciliation, al Qaeda. There seems to be no end in the line of discredited reasons for continuing the war in Iraq. Given the administration's complete inability to articulate to the American public just why we are fighting this war of aggression, one might safely ask whether it is indeed merely for the amusement of the war criminals in the White House.