“Well, we all are going to die,”
–Republican Iowa Senator Joni Enrst.
The callousness is beyond parody. If a comic book character said that shit, I would roll my eyes.
It’s worth noting that, technically, Senator Ernst is correct: we are all going to die. But that is not a reason for us to die faster and suffer while we do it. We could justify any number of absurd things by shrugging at our mortality. Forget Medicaid, we could shut down hospitals. Ernst is an ardent backer of the blue, but why should we spend so much money on the police when they are really only protecting us from the inevitable? What about the military? Does RFK Jr. know that we’re all going to die? Someone pour that man a flouride cocktail.
Ernst’s comments further evidence my suspicion that politicians are, at their core, nihilists. And not the cool kind. The kind that will “believe” whatever they need to believe to remain in power. In this day and age, that means tax cuts for billionaires. And when it comes to finding those cuts in the budget, no monetary cost is too low, and no human cost is too high.
This isn’t news, but the openness about it is. I’m not shocked that Ernst (the sound I make when I think about how the Republican party is destroying lives) doesn’t care about human lives, but I am surprised to hear her admit as much with a smile to the faces of… humans. Voters even.
It’s almost as if she’s not really beholden to the people at her town halls, but instead to her major donors, such as NORPAC, which work to “strengthen United States-Israel relations”.
But I digress.
The senator’s “apology” drives the point home. We the people are fools who believe that we will never die and that there is no god but there is a tooth fairy. Forgive us Senator Enrst, for we know not what Medicaid does.