Left Side of the Aisle #62 - Part 3

Clarabell Award: GOPper wants an end to "sob stories" about the poor and struggling

This time, the "meant to be occasional but becoming regular because I keep finding reasons to give it" Clarabell Award goes to Eric Hovde, a candidate for the GOPper nomination for US Senate in Wisconsin. During a presentation to a local Chamber of Commerce recently, after running through the usual corporate bromides about cutting corporate taxes, slashing public programs, and lowering the deficit, he went on to say that he prayed - and yes, he did day he "prayed" - that the media will write about the deficit and stop writing sob stories - and yes, he did say "sob stories" - about people struggling in the recession.

Quoting him: "Stop always writing about, 'Oh, the person couldn't get, you know, their food stamps or this or that.'" Now, leave aside the fact that according to a National Journal study of the five largest-circulation newspapers in the US, the media already give at least as much attention to the deficit as to unemployment, and usually far more. The thing is, you can see his point: The last thing any right winger wants you to hear about is the effects on actual people of the kinds of things they are proposing.

Sean Lansing, a spokesman for the campaign, said Hovde was saying "that issues like waste, fraud, abuse and out-of-control government spending are what's really hurting the poor."

Oh, barf. I remember years back when some lame-o GOPper running for Congress claimed "the cruelest tax on the poor is inflation," which was a GOPper sound byte at the time. Not hunger, not unemployment, not inadequate housing, not inadequate public services, not lack of health care, not lack of opportunity, not the lack of a future or the hope for one, no, no, none of that was the real problem for the poor. It was "inflation." Then, as now, the GOPpers will tell you that the real problem for the poor is whatever they themselves are concerned with at the moment.

Well, that guy was a clown. And Eric Hovde and Sean Lansing: So are you.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/18/eric-hovde-sob-stories-poor-people_n_1605343.html