Robert Scheer: Love the fetus and shun the child

to me, it's the height of bald-faced hypocrisy to rail and fulminate over abortions and then to leave vulnerable children poor and hungry while sending our young adults desperate for work to fight and die in wars that only benefit the super-rich elites... and that's not even to mention the enormous death toll of citizens of other countries the is the grim legacy of our pursuit of endless war...

from truthdig via common dreams...

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the “tough love” callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

The ensuing wave of state-imposed eligibility restrictions was designed to replace the war on poverty with a war on welfare recipients, with the result that in this time of economic crisis the poor have nowhere to turn. It also allowed states to play in a meanness derby, cutting the welfare rolls and forcing many of the desperate to cross state lines to locales where they might survive. “My take on it was the states would push people off [the assistance lists] and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration over this issue and who told the Times for the recent article, “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be."

Edelman, now a law professor at Georgetown University, was a close friend of the Clintons. His principled resignation was a rare exception to the cheerleading by Democrats who celebrated President Clinton’s betrayal of the poor as shrewd triangulation.

[...]

Calling the shots on spending for the most vulnerable since the Clinton revisions went into effect, the states have diverted funds for the poor to filling other holes in state budgets. Consequently, as the New York Times piece noted last week, “Just one in five poor children now receive cash aid, the lowest level in nearly 50 years.”

The response of the right-to-life Republicans has been typical—indifference to the fate of the fetus once it’s born.

the "i've got mine so screw you" mentality has not only modeled itself on cold indifference, it's morphed into a contest to see who can be more petty and just plain mean...

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