The trauma of trauma care in Georgia

  This whole sad episode about the firing of Bob Colvin from Memorial — a good guy facing a pretty much impossible task — got me thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago.

In one of the Savannah Music Festival’s few boneheaded moves, state Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Savannah) was allowed to say a few words on the Lucas stage before the (great) concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Stephens, microphone in hand, proceeded to crow about how the Georgia legislature was finally going to do something about the need to fully fund adequate trauma care in south Georgia, and indeed all across the state.

What this had to do with Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky I still don’t know, but I shrugged it off at the time. Stephens is on the right side of the trauma issue, after all, and has been working hard to get real legislative work done about it while idiots in his party like Sonny Perdue have been more concerned with bringing in more Chinese businesses to Georgia and more Chinese products to Georgia’s already-overstuffed ports.

However, in the wake of the trauma bill’s total failure at the very end of the session, Stephens’s appearance at the Savannah Music Festival now looks like a particularly loathsome brand of grandstanding. No, it’s not his fault the bill didn’t pass, didn’t even have a chance to pass. But he is tarnished by his own party’s actions on this issue. It’s not fair, but then again politics isn’t.

Here’s the thing: I don’t give a flip that Stephens was on the right side of the issue, because he is simply a cog in this failed Republican leadership of Georgia. Failed, as in Bush-level failure. I mean this is possibly the most irresponsible state government in the country right now, which is really saying something.

The Democrats who ran the state for decades before them were hopelessly corrupt, to be sure. But at least the Democrats gave back some of the money they stole from us, in the form of some services.

The Republicans just steal.

Stephens, while an intelligent, well-meaning guy who would have been a solid conservative Democrat in the old days, is just another part of the whole lunkheaded posse. He and his entire crew — Perdue, Cagle, the insane Glenn Richardson, and Savannah’s own talk-tough-but-deliver-nothing Eric Johnson all need to go back to their day jobs in corporate America and let someone with an ounce of decency and integrity and most of all, real ability, take over.

Not that I have great faith in Democrats to engineer any big electoral victories, but I tell you this: Georgia is sinking and sinking fast, and it started spiraling downhill much faster when Perdue and his feckless Republicans took over. Bottom line, they all need to go and go soon.

You and your loved ones are likely going to need trauma care at some point, and I hope you all remember who killed it when they had a slam dunk opportunity to help it.

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