What Protection, George?

If we look at the projected 2007 budget from the Bush Administration the immediate question becomes; who are we protecting?
The despot, Bush, says his administration has "focused the nation's resources on our highest priority:protecting our citizens and our homeland."
Homeland is a mockery coming from Bush. It reminds of the Third Reich homeland coming from his lips.
His mean spirtited budget invests billions in warfare and cronyism and takes away more and more of the little protection citizens of poverty, age and disability have to just survive.
Republicans, and apparently a number of Democrats, think making copays and deductibles will make the healthcare consumer more invested in their care..so they say.
What really occurs is the poorer healthcare consumer already puts off care until they're in an emergency stage. The new cuts will gut programs already strapped and dissuade the most vulnerable citizen from seeking healthcare when they have to choose to eat or pay a copay that's been raised beyond their means.
Maybe ten or twenty dollars means nothing to most of us but it means the difference between eating or seeing a doctor or dentist for the poor and weakest.
Some of the disabled have only sixty dollars or less each month they can spend after their rent is paid.
Mental health centers dependent on federal dollars to serve the severe and persistently mentally ill have already cut to the bone. They under pay their staffs. Now they'll see more cuts.
The end result won't save money but will kill more citizens.
The emergency rooms will see more visits by consumers who couldn't afford to do preventative care.
The prisons and jails will see even more of the mentally ill incarcerated because they were unmedicated.
And there will be deaths for lack of care and concern.
How does this protect our citizens, Mr. Bush?
And we haven't even discussed education, homelessness, lack of healthcare insurance, the outsourcing of jobs and the destruction of unions to reduce wages.
Have we allowed the words of terror, 9/11 and other fear-mongering phrases uttered by this administration to make us lose common sense?
Have we allowed our fear to prevent acting against tyranny and the constant erosion of the very rights we claim we hold dear? The rights we proudly hail to justify illegal wars, deaths of American sons and daughters and countless deaths of innocent civilians.
We're deluding ourselves if we think for one minute the Bush regime is protecting anybody but the rich and powerful.
We've been in a national coma of fear and denial far too long and risk losing any semblance of freedom.
Protection has an Orwellian twist when it comes from George Bush and his rogue government.