Fifty years ago today our world was way-way smaller. We here at Compatible Creatures were smaller:Â Only eight-years-old. Howdy Doody, the puppet. Lee Marvin as a TV detective and those Pall Mall commericals ending with…”outstanding! And they are mild.”

And now fifty years later, our world is even-more smaller. We, however, are way-way grown. In 1957, the US population was just under 172 million, the world as a whole contained only 2.8 billion people. Now there’s 303 million Americans occupying the same space; a total of 6.6 billion populate the same planet.

Telephones in October 1957 were huge, awkward things. Always black requiring big cradles to rest between loud, charring rings. Leave It To Beaver had become our favorite TV show (premiering that fall) as our family acquired its first TV set sometime during that same year.

Decider George had turned 11 that previous July. (Just to keep all this historical bullshit in perspective).

When the Russkies launched that little space load (less than 200 pounds) off the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the shit really hit the fan. And appears to have never ceased. The US responded by racheting up everything from more science in schools, more nuclear payloads on SAC bombers to a full-fledged space program, and even more Red-Scare silliness with bumper stickers like ‘Better Dead Than Red.’ The freakin’ Russkies can now rain nuclear horror down from space!
In 1960, Kennedy bellowed about reaching the moon within the decade. Nine years later lo, and behold, a man walks the moon.

One facade arising from Sputnik was the extreme-high value placed on education. Decider George, we, and millions of other like-aged Americans were almost-formally instilled with a fever of school, grade school, high school, especially moving on to college: The ages-old Protestant Work Ethic as applied to the classroom, but in this case, however, without all the hard-ass, freakin”-work, and no-freakin’-gripin’ attitude of the ‘Great Depression’ generation, and their predessors.

This so-called ‘Boomer’ population is most-likely the laziest, most-affluence-influenced people on the globe, and in a true ironic twist: the first presidents from this boomer bunch is Wild Bill Clinton and freakin’ Decider George. And they both went to college, Wild Bill with at least some desire to read, and Decider George…well, he had money.

And a very-sure bet was Decider George didn’t wait until 1957 to see his first TV. The little asshole might have had one in his own room!

So the very true act of Decider George this week popping a veto on a health care program for those caught in that potent financial purgatory between ‘poor’ and ‘non-poor’ should have come as no surpise, or produce anger.

Hypocrisy and moral blindness, however, does still cause one to flinch. And get pissed!

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a state/federal program, helps bankroll health insurance for nearly 7 million people nationwide, most of them children. The program’s aim is to aid those whose paycheck amount is both high and low: Too much for Medicare, too little for private care.
The US Senate passed SCHIP in September and sweet Decider George had told the general public he’d veto the bill if it got to the White House. And damn-well, shit-fire, sure-enough.
One giant step towards socialized medicine, that’s Decider George’s excuse, and would be too expensive.

In a recent poll by the Washington Post and ABC TV, about 72 percent of Americans backed the legislation, which allow almost 4.5 million more children to receive at least minimal medical care. Offsetting the $35 million cost of SCHIP over five years required raising tax on cigarettes from $.62 to a dollar a pack.
Seems like a good piece of legislature.

No, I don’t think so, so says Decider George and his boys. The program would make the not-poor become lazy and want to switch from private insurers to government-financed coverage. And just who does Decider George decide is actually “poor” or are just faking it.

A rally in Lancaster, PA, yesterday: “Poor kids, first,” Decider George told supporters as if he could actually sense the freakin’ difference between ‘not-really-poor’ and ‘really-poor.’ He also said a compromise “that focuses on the poor children” and, we surmise, not those not-poor, should be worked out in Congress.
The biggest load of shit on top of the truth. “…the policies of the government ought to be,” Decider George blubbered, was to “help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in.”

In that hypocite/imbecile landscape: “…help people find private insurance…” actually means to keep tons of hard-earned money boiling into that freakin’ medical provider/insurance industry, a major rip off on its own.
In using the veto, Decider George again displayed his arrogance, shallow intellect and low-social skills.

An asshole act, however, can sometimes link together enemies.

Democratic Sen. Edward “Eddie Haskell” Kennedy practically screamed: “..the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country” and charging “it is incomprehensible, it is intolerable, it is unacceptable.”
On the other side of the pew, Sen. Orrin Hatch, a longtime, hardline Republican: “If we’re truly compassionate, it seems to me we’d want to endorse this program.”

And if not truly compassionate?

Maybe deep, down in his superficial soul, Decider George longs for a return to those much-easier than his later-easy days of yesteryear, in the fall of 1957, and have the ability to scream at them Russkies and their nasty-little Sputnik — ‘Bring it on!’