Daily Kos: Shameless. Absolutely Shameless.
When I was somewhere around twelve years old, I remember vividly going with my mother, on one singular wait-in-the-car-and-don’t-talk-to-anyone occassion, to the food bank of a local church to pick up two heaping bags of groceries. An expected paycheck didn’t come, then another, and so a family of six living hand to mouth under the best of times suddenly found themselves completely without, for a week.
Even though our own Catholic church offered the same relief, my mother went to the Lutheran church a few blocks from our house, so that those we went to church with wouldn’t know or ever hear that our family needed to beg for a week’s groceries. And no matter what came, we never but never took any government help. There was pride, and then there was pride.
So given all that — just a single week of falling off an edge that lurks just beyond the refrigerator door of millions of families in this nation — I’ll never understand the Republican fascination with screwing the poor at every opportunity. Countless numbers of American middle class families are one month, one week, or one very bad day away from being poor, indebted, or homeless, or at the very least not having enough food for the kids during one particular week. While my Catholic family was indeed, sigh, unalterably Republican, watching the Reagan years it didn’t take much to demonstrate just how much Republicans loathed the middle class — the average folks who had paychecks, not trusts, and whose most sizable long-term investments consisted of the savings account at their bank, not stock market portfolios.
And I’m not talking “ignored”, or “were indifferent to”, but absolute hatred. The idea that some poor person, somewhere, might be sucking a dime too many out of the system is largely used as the reason to carve, gut and bury whatever safety-net welfare programs the party sets its eyes on. Rather screw a thousand people, than to have the children of some undeserving “welfare queen” get milk today.
But God Help Us All if we don’t pass, in the middle of all of this apparently urgent pain, yet another business-humping, morality-punching tax cut for the folks with greens fees to pay.
Whatever. My tolerance for these pretenders of morality has been pegged at zero for a decade. I can’t wait to hear the Fox News spin on how those nasty children on Medicare or those bastards taking advantage of the school lunch program are hurting the God given economic competitiveness of the investor class.
Update by kos: This was large a party line vote (52-47) except for the following:
Democrats voting for it:
Landrieu (LA)
Nelson (NE)Republicans voting against it:
Chafee (RI)
Coleman (MN)
Collins (ME)
DeWine (OH)
Snowe (ME)
THIS is why it matters who is in charge, my dear brother. This is why it matters. Republicans like watching people suffer, and Democrats don’t. That’s pretty much it.
One Response
Its not that “Republicans like watching people suffer,”
its because Republicans have learn they can profit by watching people suffer.
it boils down to greed and self interest.
Democrats are as greedy but they want to profit from helping people be more.
Now having said this…. how does that reflect in our culture, that the Republicans are the dominate party??
To be fair I know I am generalizing, but the republican party seems to have attracted some amoral souls in the higher ranks.
Casey
http://www.personaltao.com