It looks like there’s going to be a good scrap over President Bush’s imminent veto of the SCHIP bill. The NYT, under the tendentious title, “Congress Set for Veto Fight on Child Health Care,” solemnly intones:

President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress prepared Monday for a showdown over the future of health insurance for more than 10 million children.

The NYT reporters do their best to depict this as a contest between “a broad bipartisan” coalition that merely wants to provide health coverage for “the kids” and a penny-pinching ideologue:

The president says the measure … costs too much and would be “an incremental step toward the goal of government-run health care for every American.”

They know, of course, that the issue is far more complicated than that. In reality, much of the SCHIP money allocated for the health care of low-income children has been diverted to adults and kids from families with incomes far above the poverty line.

Nonetheless, I imagine most of the establishment media will join the NYT and the Democrats in depicting Bush as a cross between Scrooge and Darth Vader. It will be interesting to see if the public falls for it.