Administration adding insult to injury

Administration adding insult to injury
Commentary

http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2003/08/31/digitalcity.0831-SH-D8_RSZ08215.sto

By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN

This poignant Labor Day, when the numbers are bad, the policies are worse and the jobs are disappearing, it's not so much the economy that riles me as the disrespect and the gratuitous contempt with which this administration treats working Americans. The old insult to injury.

If we've had an administration so blinkered by class blinders before, it is not within my memory. What these people know about working-class Americans would fit in a gnat's eye. In the summer of 2002, when Ted Kennedy and the late Paul Wellstone were working to get an emergency extension on unemployment benefits — something that has been largely pro forma under earlier administrations — Majority Whip Tom DeLay protested that Democrats want "unlimited unemployment so people could stay out of work for the rest of their lives." Actually, one million unemployed workers had already exhausted their benefits before the House finally acted in January 2003, and were simply left in the streets with nothing under the too-little, too-late Bush bill.