Liberty Maven$48 Billion To Fight AIDS? Compassionate Conservatism At Its Worst
July 26th, 2008 1:38 pm | by Marc Gallagher | Published in Big Government, Debt, Economics, Maven Commentary, national debt, Politics, Taxes | 4 Responses
The current Bush AIDS relief plan expires at the end of September. That was a Bush backed plan to send $15 Billion overseas (mostly Africa) to combat the proliferation of AIDS. Now, the House has approved another Bush backed relief plan that more than triples the current plan, bringing the total to $48 Billion. Bush is said to be running around with pen in hand anxious to sign the bill.
I must sound like a jackass for saying anything against such a “charitable” thing but if that is the case then so be it. I don’t care if it is AIDS relief or sending billions of our tax payer money to places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Israel for whatever reason. I think we should just stop. If I were to become President (gods help us all) I’d install a large plasma screen (at my own private expense) on the ceiling above my bed in the White House. On the screen will be the the National Debt clock. Every day after falling asleep I will have ticking number nightmares and wake up in a cold sweat until I take action so that the numbers reverse and start counting towards zero.
It is actions like these that confirm the notion that the two major parties are just more of the same.
I feel like crying. I feel like what my daughter must feel like when I brush her ever-tangled hair each night. “Daddy, please make it stop!” I guess I’m supposed to welcome Big Daddy Government’s painful brush by now, but I just can’t do it, not even for AIDS relief.
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July 26th, 2008 at 7:36 pm (#)
Compassionate Conservatism At Its Worst
It really is.
I’ll post the legendary Shikwati interview as a reminder of the other costs associated with our “compassion”:
“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.
July 27th, 2008 at 7:07 pm (#)
It’s really quite simple. Compassion has absolutely nothing to do with it. Is it legal, or is it illegal?
The Constitution explicitly delineates what the Federal Government may do. Then it says that anything else not spelled out in the Constitution shall be handled by the states, and the people.
So, does the Constitution make provisions for foreign aid?
No, it doesn’t. Therefore, doing so would be an illegal act, and any president or member of Congress voting for such a thing is in violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution and should be considered a traitor to this nation.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:33 pm (#)
Here’s another very interesting Aid for Africa piece, and what our “compassion” has done:
Writing what I should have written so many years ago
By Kevin Myers
Tuesday July 22 2008
Last Thursday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia. Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia’s population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million. Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language — as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible Famine.
I was sure that my column would arouse some hostility: my concerns were intensified when I saw the headline: “Africa has given the world nothing but AIDS.” Which was not quite what I said — the missing “almost” goes a long way; and anyway, my article was about aid, not AIDS.
[...]
We did more in Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago than just rescue children from terrible death through starvation: we also saved an evil, misogynistic and dysfunctional social system. Presuming that half the existing population (say, 17 million) of the mid 1980s is now dead through non-famine causes, the total added population from that time is some 60 million, around half of them female.
That is, Ethiopia has effectively gained the entire population of the United Kingdom since the famine. But at least 80pc of Ethiopian girls are circumcised, meaning that no less than 24 million girls suffered this fate, usually without anaesthetics or antiseptic. The UN estimates that 12pc of girls die through septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision which probably means that around three million little Ethiopian girls have been butchered since the famine — roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.
So what is the moral justification for saving a baby from death through hunger, in order to give her an even more agonising, almost sacrificial, death aged eight or 13? The practice could have been stamped out, with sufficient political will, as sutti in India once was. And the feminists of the west would never have allowed such unconditional aid to be given to such a wicked and brutal society if it had been run by white men.
But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies: thus the two most politically incorrect sins of our age — sexism and racism — by some mysterious moral process, akin to the mathematics of the double-negative, annul one another, and produce an unquestioned positive virtue, called Ethiopia.
I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.
[...]
Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia’s population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria’s population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.
Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.
But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:56 pm (#)
Thanks MacGhill… very interesting stuff.
-Marc