Quote of the Day: The Heartless and Mean Spirited GOP

In addition to needing a lobotomy and/or the IQ of a cretin, in order to be a Republican nowadays one needs to be at best morally bankrupt and/or one who holds the Gospel message of Christ - a figure the GOP base claims to revere - in utter contempt.  How else to explain the GOP House's passage of massive corporate handouts to corporate farming while eliminating any funding for food stamps.  Isn't feeding hungry children core to the Gospel message?  Michael Kinsley describes today's GOP well in a piece in The New Republic.  Here is the money quote:

[T]he Republican-controlled House has chopped off and discarded food stamps. (The program is now called “SNAP”—an acronym for something or other.) It’s like amputating a gangrenous limb, then keeping the limb and discarding the rest of the body.

Forget about kids going to bed hungry. (Melodramatic, but accurate.) Can this possibly be good politics? Are there actually people out there waiting for a candidate who will kill the food stamp program? It takes your breath away. The Republicans have now cornered the heartless vote. But are there enough heartless people in this country to counterbalance the sane people fleeing the other way?

The net effect of the farm bill, as it stands now in the House, is to take money away from a successful program for making sure that no one starves, and giving it to a variety of programs whose goal is to raise the price of food, for the poor and everyone else. Even if you only care about how things look, this does not look good, it seems to me.

As I have said many times, the GOP has become something truly ugly.  And the transformation began when the Christofascists hijacked the party grass roots.  The sickness continues to fester.

The GOP’s "Principled" Suicide

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker floats back and forth between la la land apologies for the Republican Party to clear eyed recognition that the GOP is drifting further and further into extremism and likely long term political death.  In a column in the Washington Post she is back in reality based mode and lambasts the GOP controlled House of Representatives for passing a farm bill devoid of any provisions for food stamps.  Here are highlights:

Republicans seem to be adopting the self-immolation tactics of principled martyrs.  Of course, principled or not, you’re still dead in the end.

At this stage in the second term of the president they couldn’t defeat, Republicans seem more like stubborn children refusing to come out of their rooms for supper, even though the alternative is going to bed hungry.

This simile is unavoidable in light of the House’s passage of a farm bill without any provision for food stamps — the first in 40 years. The move prompted fantastic outrage from Democrats, notably Rep. Corrine Brown (Fla.), who shrieked: “Mitt Romney was right: You all do not care about the 47 percent. Shame on you!”

Republicans argued that they’d prefer to deal with agricultural issues in one bill without the leverage of a welfare program.

These two programs historically were tied together in the spirit of — watch out now — compromise. And, though food stamps certainly will be funded, probably at current levels, through some other vehicle, Republicans managed to create yet another partisan problem where none existed and opened themselves up for gratuitous criticism.   Was this really the right fight at the right time?

The wrong time would be in the midst of the politically life-altering debate on immigration reform. Again, congressional Republicans want to parse reform in pieces, excluding the 11 million or so immigrants here illegally, instead of dealing with reform comprehensively, as the Senate has done — and as most Americans think necessary.

90 percent of life is picking your battles, and congressional Republicans keep picking the wrong ones. This is not true of all. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has joined Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) to push comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans are not shooting straight when they insist that the Senate bill’s path to citizenship is de facto amnesty. As paths go, it’s a 13-year pilgrimage along a precipice lined with bramble bushes — taxes, fines and various burning hoops through which one must leap in order to stand in line. Hardly rose-petal strewn.

Republican intransigence is further compounded by the echo chamber of the Tinker Bell Coalition — the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and National Review’s Rich Lowry, who recently co-authored an editorial urging Republicans to drive a stake through the heart of immigration reform.
These are the same two who thought Sarah Palin would be the perfect running mate for John McCain.
. . . fairy dust has a way of contaminating the Republican Way of Thinking. Before you can govern, you have to win. And before you can win, you have to offer something people want to buy.

What Republicans are selling appeals to an ever-diminishing market that doesn’t even include their erstwhile allies in business and industry. And their self-immolation may prove to have been nothing more than a bonfire of vanities.

Ouch!!!  She's right, of course.  Increasingly the House GOP cares nothing for what a majority of Americans want or think.  It's all about pleasing the spittle flecked Christofascists and the knuckle dragging Neanderthals of the Tea Party.

GOP Excludes Food Stamps from Farm Bill

For a political party that falls all over itself pretending to honor - indeed worship - Christian values, the passage of a GOP Farm Bill yesterday that excluded any funding for Food Stamps (which were described as one of "some extraneous pieces") demonstrates that the hypocrisy of today's Republicans is now complete.  How is one honoring the Gospel message of feeding the hungry and caring for the poor when one votes for passage of legislation that kicks their poor and hungry to the curb?  These modern day Pharisee truly would like to see the poor just die off and disappear.  Especially if they are non-white.  Mitt Romney's "the 47%" comment did indeed show today's real GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this disgusting display of GOP hypocrisy and selfishness:

There was a rare moment of candor on the House floor this week.  Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), a committee chairman and the man who led House Republicans to their majority in 2010, was explaining why he and his colleagues decided to drop the food stamp program from the farm bill. 

“What we have carefully done is exclude some extraneous pieces,” he said.  Extraneous? For almost 50 years, food stamps have been part of the annual farm bill, and the $80 billion spent on the program keeps tens of millions of Americans, about half of them children, from going hungry.

Without a single Democratic vote, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill that, if allowed to stand, would provide hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies but not a dime for the hungry. Happily, Americans are unlikely to starve as a result of Thursday’s vote because the Senate won’t allow the House’s farm bill to become law if the food stamp program isn’t restored.

But as a political matter, the food stamp folly shows just what a difficult situation Republican leaders find themselves in. For the second time in two days, they had been forced to placate conservatives in their own ranks by taking a position that alienates crucial segments of the electorate.

On Wednesday, the House GOP caucus huddled and determined that, because of conservatives’ objections, they would not take up the bipartisan Senate immigration bill, or any major immigration legislation, anytime soon.

. . . . inviting new charges that Republicans are hostile to racial minorities — 36 percent of food stamp beneficiaries are identified as white — and the poor. 

Today's "conservatives" - most of whom describe themselves as "godly Christians" - are horrible people who care nothing about others and add daily fuel to why one would never be described as a Christian.