UNSHAKABLE REPUBLICAN BELIEFS

Got a hair cut from a new barber. The young woman that had been cutting my hair disappeared from the shop so I selected “the next one available” option on the computer check in menu. To start a conversation, I asked if she was from North Carolina. She proceeds to tell me that she grew up in a large family on a small farm in Eastern North Carolina. She said her father was a hard working-man; he even worked on Christmas day, which unusually means livestock of some type are involved. She responded that inquiry by saying her father only had two sheep and raised tobacco. Then she volunteered his political philosophy and presumably, hers, “People who do not work should not be given anything”. Although she used the passive voice, she was clearly referring to government welfare. As any person who grew up on a small farm in a large family in North Carolina will tell you, by comparison, everybody on welfare is lazy. She did not say it but implied that her father never got a thing he did not work for, etc. I did not to dissuade her as long as I was setting in her chair and she had the clippers held at ready.

The persistent renouncement of people on welfare is a central theme of Republican Party dogma peddled to the people who live in small town on farms—conservative or Red State America and; perhaps the hardest working but least economically rewarded people in the nations; the political opposites of poor people living in urban America. Every Republican believes almost everyone on welfare don’t need it or are outright cheats; Ronald Reagan, using welfare Queen, turned the word ‘liberal’ in a slur.

Conservatives believe welfare recipients are on drugs; they believe all liberals are on welfare and are somehow committing voter fraud to elect Democrats to support them; they believe liberals want redistribution of wealth; something beyond sharing of wealth through salaries and taxes. This means people on welfare are living off someone else’s hard work: the taxpayer’s dollars, which they go farther and translate that to mean if there is no welfare, there will be no taxes. They tend to personalize it. In contrast to themselves, who work hard for their money at great sacrifice to themselves—even on Christmas Day, liberal are always looking for a free handout.

They only listen to frenzied Fox News Hosts, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh or read only radical right-wing blog sites, each one telling the next how bad it really is; the way liberals tramp on their rights; and it gets worse in each telling. They end up in not a very nice place: an irrational hell from which there is no logical escape. A place that requires drastic action such as a nation wide effort to stop the cheating—second amendment remedies, the right to protect them selves from Obama who is going to come and take their guns, etc, which renders them vulnerable to these and other radical ideas including racism, homophobia, anti immigration, and suppression of women’s rights. It gets so bad those right wing pundits such as Anne Coulter believes that liberals have some sort of mental disease.

The truth is that there is far less than 1% cheating on welfare. The same is true of drug use by people on welfare as Gov. Scott of Florida found when his company was making huge sums of menu testing anyone applying for welfare. Every study ever done has shown that voter fraud is so low it is nearly non-existent. Essentially none of what they believe is factually true. You can tell them that and you can show them the statistics. They refuse to believe the facts, apparently because everyone they talk to, everyone they listen to, and everything they read is telling them they are right. To avoid an irresolvable internal conflict they go with the flow. Obamacare is a case in point. There is a 12% point difference in polling results when pollsters ask people if they prefer Obamacare or Affordable Healthcare Act; they hate Obamacare but see something good in Affordable Health Care.

The truth is different from what they believe; Republicans hate the “nanny” government concept. They hate EPA but want a clean environment. They hate FAA until they are in a plane. They hate FEMA until a hurricane puts them on the street.They also hate seeing disabled people, wounded warrior, children, and old people go hungry or without a home. They hate it but are willing to see all of them suffer because less that 1% of are cheaters. They see nothing wrong with “Coulter logic” when she says those homeless people should get up off the grates they sleep on in the street of Washington D.C. and go to Harvard as she did—it is true, she worked hard and never asked for anything. They can do the same thing as she did, after all America the land of equal opportunity. If you think all of this is dumbfounding, why not ask why people on welfare vote for Republicans? Ask my new barber why she votes Republican and she will carefully explain that she and her Daddy work very hard for their money and do not want to give it away to welfare cheaters and perpetually pregnant sex crazy single mothers, which is something that both Republicans and Democrats agree on.

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