Don Surber asks: “Will there be a VA bill by Veterans Day?”

44 Republican senators sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Plurality Leader Harry Reid urging them to pass stand-alone Defense and VA spending bills by Veterans Day. The letter included this zinger: “Our soldiers and veterans already have done so much for our county. The Democratic Congressional Leadership should not now cynically use them to shoulder a bloated ‘minibus’ funding bill up Pennsylvania Avenue and wrest billions in excessive spending.”

A minibus. I love it.

Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for the White House budget office, told CQ: “They need to send the president a clean veterans’ funding bill that we have already agreed to by Veterans Day, so we can keep America’s promise to those who have defended our freedom and are recovering from injury.”

Will they? Nope. The Democrat way is to “support the troops” by holding war and military funding hostage to the massive S-CHIP entitlement expansion plan. Craven crapweasels that they are, the Dems are on the trail pounding their “It’s the war or the kids!” propaganda. Assorted Babble received a survey from Florida Dem. Robert Wexler that lays out the strategy:

Just this week the President announced plans to ask Congress for an additional $46 billion for the war in Iraq, a war that has already cost Americans almost a half a trillion dollars. Every single day in Iraq we spend $330 million. That means that we could provide 10 million low-income children across the country, with health insurance for a year, with less than the cost of 40 days in Iraq.

I’m writing you today to ask you what your priorities would be in Congress. Please take the time to fill out the survey on the right so that I can better represent you in Congress.

The four “choices:”

1. Congress should provide health care funding for 10 million kids instead of the war in Iraq.
2. Congress should not provide funding for the health care bill, and continue funding the Iraq war.
3. Congress should fund both the children’s health care plan and the war in Iraq.
4. Congress should not fund the children’s health care bill or the war in Iraq.

Rush Limbaugh caught Nancy Pelosi’s singing the same tune:

PELOSI: The annual cost of assuring ten million children in America is 40 days spent in Iraq. Forty days in Iraq, ten million children insured in America in one year. So we certainly can afford to do this.
RUSH: It’s not about affording it, Ms. Pelosi, and you know this — and, of course, ten days or 40 days in Iraq? How about all the redundant social programs that have way too much money being spent on them with way too much waste and fraud? Why don’t you go get the money from there? We’re talking about US national security you want to endanger! We’re on the threshold of victory, and she wants to snatch it. She wants to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — and this old line? She used this line two or three weeks ago. This is not inspiring her side. It’s not inspiring the American people, this kind of shock, ultra-left-wing liberalism. The S-CHIP program, by the way, if you look at all the polls on it, the message got out. The Drive-By Media monopoly is over. Once the American people found out that the S-CHIP program she’s talking about is not just poor children. It’s “children” up to the age of 25. It’s families with three or four times the poverty level of income! That’s not what the American people want a health program “for poor kids” to be about. This is nothing more than — what’s the old phrase? — the camel getting its nose under the tent? If somebody said today that if they got the S-CHIP program and they got Medicare and Medicaid on the other end, then they’ve got the middle class surrounded, and all that’s left to get national socialized medicine is to find your way into the middle class.

Well, this was a stealth way of doing it. Now, the real question is this: Do the Democrats really want this program to pass? Do they really want the override to pass? See, I don’t think — and the dirty little secret is, folks, the Democrats don’t care about “the children.” “The children” are merely the vehicle in which they drive in order to get this thing down the road to accomplish what they want to accomplish. What they want to accomplish is to embarrass the president and to be able to cast Republicans as against the children, particularly against the poor children because that’s their cliché, and it’s the cliché that’s been in their playbook for 40 years. Republicans hate the poor. Republicans hate minorities. Republicans hate this. Republicans only love the rich. Those things don’t fly anymore. The class-envy business is something that hadn’t really been that successful for them for quite a while. Yet it’s the only thing they know how to play, the only card they know how to play. Once the American people found out about it, the thing was up. But what they really want, they don’t want this to pass. They’re not trying to get this done for the kids. They’re trying to get this done for themselves. They want this as an election issue for all of next year.

NPR dutifully files a sky-is-falling piece in advance of the third floor fight on S-CHIP.

Hold on tight. The Dems will be flinging their kiddie human shields around left and right. Er, left and left. The battle doesn’t end.