Day: January 8, 2014

The War On Poverty DId Not Fail! It Was Destroyed By Republicans, Led By Nixon And Reagan!

Ronald 2 Comments

50 years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a War On Poverty In America, and poverty levels dropped about 40 percent over the next five years.

But then the conservative counterrevolution began under Richard Nixon, and was accelerated under Ronald Reagan, and today, poverty is spreading in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

And what is the Republican Party doing about this reality? It is declaring the War on Poverty failed, and doing everything to kick poor people and middle class people down into the gutter, fighting against extension of unemployment compensation to desperate people, having no problem in cutting food stamps to people who have inadequate nutrition, and fighting to avoid raising the minimum wage, which, if it was keyed to inflation, would be over $20 an hour right now!

The War On Poverty never got a full chance to succeed, as Democrats Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, and Walter Mondale never had the opportunity to continue the mission of LBJ, and instead, selfishness, greed, and lack of compassion for those less fortunate, set in!

On this 50th anniversary, it is essential to recommit ourselves to dealing with poverty in America, realizing the majority of people in poverty are children, and also a majority are white, not minorities, which are used as an excuse to promote racial prejudice!

The Total Hypocrisy Of Republican Politicians!

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The Republican Party and the conservative movement love to pontificate about morality and ethics, and yet are the biggest hypocrites that exist!

So we have the late Congressman Bill Young of Florida, who left his wife of 36 years in 1985 for his secretary, and totally ignored his children from that first wife, and they were even denied allowance to come to his funeral, after he died last year, after 42 years as a senior “Family Values” Republican in the House of Representatives.

So we had House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois, who led the impeachment move against President Bill Clinton in 1998-1999, who it was shown he had a child with another woman while condemning Bill Clinton for his sexual exploits.

So we had Congressman Bob Livingston of Louisiana, who was supposed to be Speaker of the House in 1999, after Newt Gingrich left, but was also shown to have had children and relationships outside of his marriage.

And of course, Newt Gingrich, the most obvious hypocrite of all, had spent his years in Congress, cheating on his wife, serving her with divorce papers while undergoing cancer surgery, married the woman he had the affair with at that time in the late 1990s, and then divorced her, after having an affair with wife number three, the blond bimbo who accompanied him on his Presidential run in 2012. Gingrich has no shame, never has, and was condemning Bill Clinton while doing the same thing, but acting puritanical.

There are so many other examples, including gay members of the Republican Party, such as Ken Mehlman, Republican National Chairman under George W. Bush, who finally “came out of the closet” after doing great damage to gays and lesbians; former Congressman David Dreier of California; Senator Larry Craig of Idaho; and most recently, Congressman Aaron Schock of Illinois, all of whom have done everything to harm and limit gay rights, while all being clearly gay men.

The lying and deceit of these GOP Politicians past and present, in the midst of condemning others for what they do, is beyond normal condemnation. It is worse than committing the acts that others do, and being “holier than thou”, and this includes evangelical pastors who are corrupt, and Catholic priests who are corrupt, but are only too willing to condemn the behavior of others who conduct their lives in the same fashion.

So the Republican party and the conservative movement are NOT the paragon of virtue. and NOT good role models for “Family Values”!