With apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer, author of Casey at the Bat

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Democrats that day:
The House’s freshmen members had put budget cuts in play.
The CR was expiring, and though HR1 was dead,
Pelosi’s shrunken conference was enraged and seeing red.

With senators retiring and the President gone mute,
Joe Biden leading budget talks, McConnell in pursuit,
And unemployment figures tearing ’part her union base,
The former speaker headed to the mike to state her case.

She needed to avoid faux pas that some, like Harry, made
Who wept o’er cowboy poetry and cuts he wished delayed.
So Nancy threw a presser ’cause the media, she knew,
Would treat her ev’ry word as though it was their point of view.

The press all herded in the room at the appointed time,
To hear the former speaker toss them pearls of thought sublime.
“The new CR is horrid; it is not a healthy bill.
I’m thinking of the children, as you know I always will.”

So said our good friend Nancy, or some words to that effect,
And dutifully the media agreed she was correct.
“The NIH is ruined in this bill and there’s no doubt
We’ll see the incidents increase of cancer, bends and gout.”

“Each fam’ly in America is just one call away,
One diagnosis, accident or act of foul play
Of needing NIH, and now a billion dollar trim
To one-and-thirty-billion is, I think, a little grim.”

And then the sly ex-speaker sought the public to assure,
That “NIH has biblical ability to cure.”
Which sure confused the media assembled at her perch,
’Cause none of them had seen in years the inside of a church.

So quick on-line they scurried to start searching the Good Book
In Testaments both New and Old they frantically did look.
In Romans and Galatians, in One Timothy and Luke,
In Proverbs and in Wisdom and in all the Pentateuch,

They searched each verse and chapter and they searched the Psalms in vain.
They searched in Kings and Esther and in vain they searched again.
But Nancy sure had said it, and Pelosi don’t play games,
So they claimed that they found it in the Bible of King James.

And Nancy got her headlines and she made the evening news,
Where sympathetic journalists her every fault excuse.
But out here in the red states where we pray and all the like,
We don’t much pay attention when Pelosi’s at the mike.

thebardofmurdock.blogspot.com

Choices have consequences. Conservatives make choices for war. Against research programs that impact the health and welfare of infants. It is clear.

This debt is the desired outcome of Republican strong man Grover Norquist. The role of spending the government into impotence is undiscussed, too.

Cutting spending has implications that imoacts lives. When the melodramatics of “death panels” came into play, conservatives played big “boo-hoo” sessions about someone daring to suggest these health care acts need to exist on a budget.

Today, if one has multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, or mitochondrial disease, conservatives are now saying that figuring out better therapies or life-saving cures are too expensive.

Just say it: sorry, these wars are more important to us than your health and future. They always were. In fact, we never liked sponsoring research for this anyway.

I’m sure NIH does good work but so do many others, including our soldiers, sailors, and Marines.

The fact is the money isn’t there. Not only that, we are several trillion in the hole. You do know that with the first 800 billion dollar stimulus bill, we spent more than all the years we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan combined? How do we recover? We can’t do it by pretending someone else has to do it.

NIH, in a way big pharma can’t and won’t, does the initial research that drives a huge segment of our economy in pharmaceuticals. This has consequences. Return on investment in this tiny segment of the budget has been enormous, in a way that private industry hasn’t touched.

Every choice has consequences. Grover Norquist’s dream world of a shrunken government includes an end to the institute that succeeded in showing the world how to stop perinatal HIV transmission, how to save incredibly ill neonates, and how to limit brain injury at birth.

NIH research dollars gave the world an attempt to alter fetal anomalies, with (finally) success in reducing the brain injury and damage associated with spina bifida.

All choices come with consequences.

What has been the choices instead? Iraqi and Afghani wars?