Mean And Stupid Politics As Usual

Today I am going to hold my nose and look at politics as usual in 2012 from the Republican side. Their tried and true strategy — attack/blame the poor — is still as popular as ever, as BuzzFeed reported in Romney Camp Bets On Welfare Attack.

Mitt Romney's aides explained with unusual political bluntness today why they are spending heavily — and ignoring media criticism — to air an add accusing President Barack Obama of "gutting" the work requirement for welfare, a marginal political issue since the mid-1990s that Romney pushed back to center stage.

"Our most effective ad is our welfare ad," a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O'Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. "It's new information."

The welfare ad [video below] has been the center of intense dispute, with Democrats accusing Romney of unearthing old racial ghosts and Romney pointing out that the Obama Administration has offered states waivers that could, in fact, lighten work requirements in welfare, a central issue in Bill Clinton's 1996 revamping of public assistance.

The most effective welfare ad

This is complete bullshit, of course, but in politics there is no need to stick to the facts because propaganda is a form of emotional persuasion based on lies or half-truths.

The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" awarded Romney's ad "four Pinocchios," a measure Romney pollster Neil Newhouse dismissed.

"Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers," he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have "jumped the shark," he added after the panel.

I think it would be exceedingly generous to say we have reverted back to some vicious version of high school here because these assholes never left. We could safely ignore all this nonsense, but the fact is that the 2013 agricultural appropriations bill contains significant cuts to food stamps (the SNAP program). I'll quote from an editorial which appeared recently in The Tennesean.

One of the more sobering aspects of our nation’s crippling polarization is that issues on which Americans found consensus in the past have become fodder for political partisanship.

Fodder, indeed — these well-stocked politicians are tampering with programs that keep poor families from going hungry.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, is on the congressional chopping block, even though more people are in need of it than ever before. The Senate would cut $4.5 billion from the program over 10 years; the House, a staggering $16 billion.

If you think food stamps are used by a needy few, you are relying on outdated information. The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributes food-stamp assistance to feed 46.2 million Americans each month. In Tennessee, more than 1.2 million people applied for food stamps in 2010.

Think of that: One in five Tennesseans cannot afford to feed their families on their own.

Well, we have thought of that here on DOTE. We know exactly what the situation is.

What is their reason for the dramatic cuts? They say cheats and deadbeats are taking advantage of the public. But if 46 million people are cheating the government, how is it that the government hasn’t collapsed?

The obstinacy of lawmakers who want to tear the safety net is infuriating. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office tells them that food-stamp fraud is at an all-time low of 4.36 percent, so they trot out isolated reports of food-stamp trafficking and say that is evidence that SNAP money is wasted. This, even though the department inspects thousands of stores every year and uses the Electronic Benefit Transfer system to track food-stamp purchases.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that all government spending is a form a welfare, especially defense spending. Congressman Ron Paul thinks the United States doesn't need to be the world's policeman and leading arms dealer—by a very large margin—but he lost, also by a very large margin, in the primaries.

It is far more effective, at least among Republicans voters, to attack/blame the poor for our fiscal woes as Willard Romney does.

According to the Huffington Post, the SNAP program "now consumes 2 percent of the federal budget, or $78 billion in fiscal 2011. That's about the cost of the auto industry bailout."  That's also roughly one tenth the size of annual defense appropriations. And the food situation in the United States is very, very bad according to TruthOut's Mike Ludwig.

A Gallup poll released this week shows that 18.2 percent of Americans did not have enough money to buy the food they or their families needed at least once during the past year. In 15 states, at least 1 in 5 Americans polled in the first half of 2012 reported struggling to pay for food during the past 12 months.

Now, we have discussed the root causes of all these gross inequities at length here on DOTE, but every once and a while it behooves us to inspect a few of the deplorable facts directly, as we have done today.

But now the stench is getting too strong for me to bear, and I am unable to hold my nose any longer.

So I am forced to bring today's post to a close.

Comments

[Ben]

I watched the ad - despicable. Lee Atwater's disgusting legacy lives on, amplified by new media, to hurt more and more struggling Americans. Fuck this insane and capricious society.