The Mobbed-Up, Money-Grubbing Moralist From Florida

[dutchdemocrat]

Floyd pulls no punches once again...

Miami Vice: The Mobbed-Up, Money-Grubbing Moralist From Florida

Published in Friday, May 13 edition of The Moscow Times:

Chris Floyd is an American journalist. He writes the weekly Global Eye political column for The Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times. His work also appears in The Ecologist, The Nation, CounterPunch, Christian Science Monitor, Bergen Record, Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere around the world. He is the author of the book, Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime. His columns are featured each week on Bush Watch.

The next president of the United States was on the road last week, throwing red meat about "moral issues" to a baying crowd of Bushist Party faithful – while simultaneously trying to cut off medical support for a six-year-old girl his agents had previously tried to kill. Yes, it was Jeb Bush, governor of the ruling family's Florida dominions, pounding the pulpit, er, podium at a Republican conclave in Georgia. Jeb told the flock that the party must stand for "absolute truth" – something previously associated with religious cults – if they want to maintain their "ascendancy" over the nation, Associated Press reports. "There is such a thing as right and wrong," he declared. Whipped into a frenzy by this blazing revelation, the crowd responded with cries for Bush to ascend to his brother's throne in 2008.

But even as Jeb basked in the bootlicking adulation, his peculiar sense of "right and wrong" was on vivid display in a Florida courtroom. There, his minions are fighting to stop state aid for young Marissa Amora – four years after they sought a court order to let her die following a savage beating, the Palm Beach Post reports. What's more, these same minions – the Department of Children and Families – could have prevented the beating, which left Marissa permanently disabled.

In late 2000, as Jeb was ensuring the "ascendancy" of his brother by – among many other tricks – deliberately slashing thousands of eligible African-American voters from the rolls, Marissa was hospitalized for a month. Doctors and nurses saw telltale signs of past beatings – and witnessed her neglectful mother abusing her in the hospital. They pleaded for DCF to intervene. But the agency – perhaps mindful of Jeb's fierce public championing of "family values" – declined to step in. Then came the inevitable: a few weeks later, Marissa was back in the hospital, beaten nearly to death, with severe injuries to her brain and liver and several broken bones. Now the DCF took an interest: they rushed to court to obtain a "Do Not Resuscitate" order for the mangled two-year-old. For God's sake, don't let her live, the DCF told Marisa's doctors, because she might "potentially" be left "in a vegetative state."

But the doctors disagreed with the Bushists' expert diagnosis. And so Marissa is still alive today – brain-damaged, crippled, fed through a stomach tube, but alert, talkative, happy, with a new foster mother. Indeed, she would seem to be a shining example of the "culture of life" that we hear so much about these days from certain pulpit-pounding politicians. But to Jeb and the DCF, she's just a "useless eater," a budgetary burden, a mistake to be flushed away. Without state aid, her new family will sink beneath the staggering cost of Marissa's treatment – and the decent life that she's clawed back from the hellhole Jeb left her in years ago will wither on the vine.

<SNIP>

http://www.empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/