John Ruberry today links to a Des Moines Register article describing Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s nascent countrywide health insurance plans. In that story, the Register notes that Sen. Obama’s strategy for dealing with America’s healthcare crisis will require an investment of about $50 billion and, using what he must think is “logic”, Mr. Ruberry concludes that “A vote for Obama is a vote for higher taxes” … (go figure).

To pay for it, Sen. Obama proposes restoring the top two income tax brackets back to Clinton Administration rates. Chances are very good that no one reading this blog, nor Mr. Ruberry’s, would be affected by such a move. Moreover, poll after poll has clearly indicated that Americans realize this sort of investment — healthcare — is worthy of our tax monies.

Oddly enough, the never-ending war in Iraq that Mr. Ruberry and other partisan conservatives still support has cost Mr. Ruberry’s hometown of Morton Grove, IL alone well over $57.4 million as of 3:30pm Central today. Moreover, the $430.2 billion-with-a-B national toll for the conservatives’ war in Iraq has cost nearly 9x that of Sen. Obama’s positive proposal to date. According to CostOfWar.com, that amount could’ve covered more than a quarter billion-with-a-B kids’ healthcare for a whole year.

Perhaps Mr. Ruberry is so concerned about Sen. Obama’s lofty goals because he knows that Pres. Bush and the now-defeated rubber-stamp Republican Congreses never actually bothered to figure out how to pay for their Iraq War. Instead, Mr. Ruberry’s Republicans have been spending our kids’ money by putting these combat costs on the nation’s virtual credit card (courtesy of gargantuan loans from Communist China and terrorist-funding Saudi Arabia).

This war is costing our country roughly $100 billion dollars a year (plus the accumulating interest) and Sen. Obama’s plan is only proposed at about half that amount (and with a reasonable, unencumbering means of paying for it). Why is it that Mr. Ruberry is all too happy spending twice the money to wage a horrifically destructive zero-sum quagmire of a war but goes all chicken little with regards to Sen. Obama’s reasonable health ideas?

What sort of inverted, bizarro universe is Mr. Ruberry living in where war is a good investment but health insurance is not?

(Note that according to what passes for Mr. Ruberry’s “logic” a vote for any one of the 11 Republican candidates is also a vote for higher taxes … either that or a default on the Repulicans’ whopping debts to various international adversaries.)