Cruelty

I continue to be stunned by Eric Cantor's response to the people of Joplin. But I should not be. The Ayn Rand wing of the Republican party has taken charge. That wing doesn't actually value taking care of people, and actually thinks that helping people is ultimately bad. And a waste. This afternoon, I read about a freshman Republican who chided a constituent for asking for help.

"Hear yourself, ma'am. Hear yourself," Woodall told the woman. "You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, 'When do I decide I'm going to take care of me?'"

Which sounds all great, doesn't it? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take care of yourself. But this is a retiree, we find out, who is struggling to take care of herself.

The woman followed up. "Why aren't you leading by example, and go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. You said so in a letter to me, that your goal is to get rid of the employer-sponsored health care [system]. So why aren't you leading by example and go out yourself, decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is," she said. "You don't have any pre-existing conditions, I guess, you haven't had any life-threatening illnesses like I had last year."

Huffpo and others focused on the idiot bragging about taking government healthcare because it was free--and that is shitty. But I can't stop thinking about this woman surviving a life-threatening illness, struggling to find healthcare for herself, and having this fucking shithead tell her to just "take care of herself."

Fred, at Slactivist has a great post on this, and he brings it back to where my head explodes--that evangelical Christians side with this bullshit. Because they do. How they can look at any of this and see anything remotely Christian? How in the holy fucking world can they look at a party that is gutting the safety net for the poor, the elderly, and the disabled--and think, "yep, that is just how Jesus would do it."

If they can, then count me out. If they can read the Bible on Sunday, and vote for these fuckers on Tuesday, then they better not talk to me about morality. Or Christianity.