Republicans: Starvation Not Abortion [Anthony McCarthy]

While Republicans around the country are making laws which really end legal abortion in state after state, Republicans in Washington are voting to starve the very fetuses Republicans so hypocritically claim to care about, the women carrying them that they so obviously don't, and the mothers and children who they care even less for.

If House Republicans get their way in the federal budget for fiscal year 2012 beginning in October, nearly 500,000 women, infants, and children could be deprived of basic nutritional assistance. Though Republican leaders justify this decision on the grounds that budget deficits require "shared sacrifice," the tax cuts they recently fought to extend will give away more money to America’s 300,000 millionaires this week than it will cost to adequately fund nutrition programs for all of next year.

That’s the story and the math behind the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee decision to slash the budget for the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, by $833 million in FY 2012. WIC provides nutritious foods to low-income pregnant women, new moms, babies, and children under 5 who have been identified as nutritionally at risk. The program has done this successfully for nearly 40 years at a relatively modest cost to the federal government, which is why the program has traditionally enjoyed strong bipartisan support.

Nothing could be a clearer, real life proof that Republicans don't care about the abortion issue except as a tool of the dirtiest kind of politics.

When politicians' stands are this much at odds, when the results of an issue they claim to care about so deeply that they have made it the focus of their legislative year is the exact opposite of when it's a matter of financial support, you know that they are lying when they say they care about it.

Conservatives don't care about anyone's babies but their own. They don't care about anyone but themselves and their own.

The only thing Republicans care about in regard to fetuses is in how they can be used to get them power.

That slashing food for poor women and children can be done with little to no outcry in our media while, at the same time, that money and much, much more is handed by Republicans and a tragically unskilled Democrat to billionaires and the rest of the obscenely rich should be a final judgement on our media and our political class. The United States has fallen so far that our government can act like the most undemocratic oligarchies in the third world and it is acceptable to those in control.

We must remove them from control, both the oligarchic power holders and the media that gives them power. Our lives depend on it. It's a ground floor, foundational level definition of who we are.