Breast-feeding "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness'

 
Ever-boiling rightwing cauldron by google images

Will the rabid right ever run out of sacred cows to gore?  Or, for that matter, progressive Gores to cow?  What's next for rightwing cheap shots, having last week's bushwhacked Michelle Obama's radical support for motherhood, breast-feeding, infant nutrition, and against childhood obesity? Talk about an immoral minority that needs to suckle the milk of human kindness.

Castigating programs to educate new, needy mothers about the immense virtues of breast milk only reinforces my growing fear there is no pale beyond which extremists may go so repulsive their base turns away in horror.   The Tea Party House coalition takes no prisoners, meaning no sacred cows or safe infants or government by and for the people.   Charity for all?   Gone, forgotten, kaput. 

Yet monumental contradictions persist, like tectonic cracks.   All fetuses (who survive conception) must be born, the Biblical right demands, but that doesn't mean public support for the health or prosperity, even life of preterms and newborns.  Let them eat cake if babies can't get mother's milk.  Getting born is what God dictates, with notably empty mandates for what happens later.   Nice.

Strange how anti-abortionists worship any stranger's unborn fetus (the virulent approving murder of abortion doctors), but accept no social or political obligation to nurture even the neediest youngsters actually born.  Life is apparently only holy until you actually start breathing, then it gets hard.  What about widespread hunger already afflicting older children, as millions in our country go to bed unfed, a situation that will worsen as government aid evaporates.  But for the hard-hearted, life is a condition, a vale of tears, not an entitlement.

Baby "life panels," anyone?

And yet, pro-lifers who reject government intervention for newborns want laws banning abortion, thus awarding the same suspect, formerly hated government crushing power to thwart historic parental rights. Government overreach ain't bad when serving your ideology. Further, the same "pregnancy mandates birth" crowd unabashedly supports the conscious killing of adult prisoners -- capital punishment.  Nor, considering the chatter about fetal life, do rightwingers hesitate to own guns, not only for killing unarmed animals but facilitating gun accidents by their own unmonitored children.   

Nor does this rabid right even question when our leaders concoct unwarranted wars against a variety of evil-doers, real or perceived. Where was the pro-life outrage when nine innocent Afghan children were mistakenly killed a week ago by American drones fighting an endless, unwinnable war?  What about accused adulterers stoned to death in countries flush with our own military?

When ideologues abandon even pretend solutions to anything real (where're the jobs, Speaker Boehner?), the fallback entails belligerent provocation, exaggerated contempt, indirection, and buffoonery.  And so we come to rightwing attacks on the First Lady's modest proposals to advance breast-feeding, granting babies immunity against childhood infections (now producing 900 avoidable infant deaths a year) plus reducing later issues with obesity, diabetes, and food addictions. 

So much for my withered fantasy that some conceivable line of political no return exists -- limits beyond which the unhinged cannot go without sharp penalty.   The last two years have killed a river of audacious administration hopes, so I accept this current, literal dis-illusion-ment -- releasing this illusion. If the right escapes censure for impugning life-supporting breastfeeding, especially for poor and minority single mothers, what isn't vulnerable to sneering assault? Not only was Ms. Obama attacked for "hectoring," but criticized for pushing the new "nanny state" -- as if infant health and safety programs are just more "government takeovers."

Macbeth's witch, Greymalkin, calls

In fact, today's three "weird sisters" (Palin, Bachmann, and Malkin) challenged the First Lady's indisputable, scientific evidence that children suffer when obese, prone to diabetes and food addictions plus humiliation.  Minority children, often less breast-fed, are especially at risk, yet nothing stops vicious Michelle Malkin: "we don't need the government to tell us how to nurture and raise our kids."   This evil trio of witches knows nothing about hectoring or bullying, of course -- and if Palin's the measure, great mothers all. 

On point, since obesity (per a Harvard Medical Study) costs us $117 billion each year -- plus $13 billion for preterm infant care that more breastfeeding would obviate -- so this is no obscure family "nurture" issue.  Other than heartless ideological purity, or dislike of the less fortunate, it's hard to see what the right ultimately gains by fighting basic education that reduce our children's mortality, obesity, and disease rates?  Fewer Democratic voters in 21 years?

"Something wicked this way comes'

By the way, the U.S. suffers the highest infant mortality rate among the 33 "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund. Before Reagan became president, we were out of 33 #13th.  Before W. we were 2nd.   Great trend to the bottom.  Oddly, the National Center for Health Statistics reported premature births FELL in 2008, representing the first two-year decline in the last 30 years.  But that doesn't stop House fanatics from shredding all Planned Parenthood funding key to children's health and prosperity.   What if 9000, not 900, die in a year or two from avoidable infections?

To sum up, here are more specifics of the shocking, unfeeling, unthinking GOP notion of "winning the future" by losing healthy infants:

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