A year ago a heartless Missouri state representative named Cynthia Davis lashed out against school summer breakfast programs.She didn't understand the point. Why should the government keep kids from having breakfast at home with their folks?
This woman was so disconnected from privation and want and poverty, that it had not occurred to her that not every child has enough food to eat. She added this insulting, demeaning postscript for the hungry children of Missouri: "Tip: If you work for McDonald's, they will feed you for free during your break."
As of this month, with their members in the Senate killing a temporary, emergency extension of benefits to the jobless, Cynthia Davis's blinkered, belligerent, bestial attitude might as well be the official platform of the Republican Party.
George Will, rapidly becoming the spokesman for the year 1931, said yesterday that the Republican Senators,
"...believe that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. And we're subsidizing unemployment, that is the long-term unemployment, those unemployed more than six months, is at an all-time high and they do not think it's stimulative because what stimulates is the consumer and savers' sense of permanent income. And everyone knows that unemployment benefits are not permanent income."
So the million, 200,000 Americans who will lose their unemployment benefits this week alone are better off because, George Will and the Republicans believe, this will get them off their duffs and into those job openings that the Republicans spend of the rest of their time reminding everybody don't exist and that's all Obama's fault.
Hungry kids were eating breakfast at schools in Missouri because the government wanted to break up their families, not because their families didn't have enough money to properly feed them.
And the unemployed are unemployed because there are jobless benefits, not because the last administration crashed the economy for the benefit of Wall Street. And their kids will now be eating breakfast at schools in Missouri because —and the people who believe these sadistic fantasies? You would consider voting for them?
