Let's Make Poverty Less Enticing

The other day a shocking picture emerged when Michelle Obama went to a soup kitchen in Washington, DC. It wasn't a picture of her bulging biceps, which were mercifully covered, so David Brooks can rest easy and not have to worry about any more nightmares where the First Lady challenges him to arm wrestle. What was shocking was a photo of one of the homeless men she was serving taking a picture of her with his cellphone. Conservatives were outraged. At a time when Wall Street executives are being forced to give up their private planes, limousines, bathroom renovations and multimillion dollar bonuses, the idea that a homeless man has been allowed to hold on to his cellphone while others are making sacrifices is more than we can take.

"If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone?" wrote the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Malcolm. "And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?" Kathryn Jean Lopez pointed out that contrary to what many people think, the poor are actually very rich, which explains a lot. Michelle Malkin castigated the homeless man for "ruining what was supposed to be a sob story photo op of the compassionate Mrs. O catering to the downtrodden" and speculated that his phone bills are probably sent to Acorn.

Although some people pointed out that he may have recently come upon bad times and that he may need a cellphone, which could be of the cheap, prepaid variety, so that prospective employers can call him back, or that he may have been a worker at the shelter and not homeless at all, this is all just speculation. Kathy Shaidle, whose blog is aptly named Five Feet of Fury, has a more likely explanation, which she was able to extrapolate from this photo with a perspicacity that would have made the late traitor and On Photography author Susan Sontag proud. "Today's 'poor' are the rich Jesus warned you about: fat, slovenly, wasteful of their money and other people's," she wrote. "He spends all his (our) money on cellphones and, most likely, tattoos and drugs and booze and other crap, and has no money left for a home and food. And why should he bother? We pay for his shelter and food anyhow."

This is not the first time Ms. Shaidle, has taken on the menace of the poor. "The so-called poor have cars and cable tv and free medical," she wrote last year. "They live in America in the 21st century, where school is free and libraries are free and a bus ticket to a better town costs less than a bag of crack. If they're 'poor' it's because they were too lazy and stupid to a) finish high school and/or b) keep their pants on. Jesus had something to say about folks who didn't properly manage their money or other people's." Although I am not familiar with Jesus' admonitions against poor accounting practices, she has a point. Instead of waging class war against the wealthy who worked hard for their money, we should be attacking the poor. After a lot of unsuspecting investors were lured by the poor into putting their hard-earned money into credit defaults swaps and tricked into giving deadbeats subprime mortgages, which ruined our entire economy, haven't poor people done enough harm to this country?

I can't tell you how angry it makes me to think about extremely rude poor people all across this country talking very loudly on their cellphones in soup kitchens and unemployment offices, whining about all their financial problems so everyone can hear. I'm glad someone is finally speaking out about it. And while these poor people were rudely broadcasting their tales of woe to everyone within earshot, guess what they were eating? Mushroom risotto and Broccoli! Isn't gruel good enough for poor people anymore? Those poor people are eating better than I am. Is it really fair that I should have to eat the Pork Brains in Milk Gravy Mrs. Swift served up the other night to cut down on grocery bills and reduce my cholesterol intake, while these poor people are eating like kings?

And who is paying for poor people to live high on the hog while I am reduced to eating hog brains? Rich people like we might be some day if we work hard and win the lottery. Why should someone like Jim Cramer, who deserves to make more than $250,000 for all the great financial advice he has given the last few years, have to "take a pay cut for doing the same job." Shouldn't he in fact get a raise for telling people to continue plowing their money into the stock market as it was plunging downward, which probably helped slow the decline and prop it up long enough to help his friends get out without losing too much?

I think it's time we made the poor do their fair share and stop trying to soak the rich. Before we give the poor one cent more, they should be forced to prove that they have really hit rock bottom by selling everything they have, including their cellphones, flat-screen TVs, fancy clothes, cars and furniture. I know that if I became poor, the first thing I would do after putting the cat to sleep and pawning Mrs. Swift's wedding ring would be to sell my cellphone at the very least. And I certainly wouldn't expect to eat mushroom risotto. If we stopped making it so enjoyable to be poor, maybe we would have fewer lazy, greedy people who are just dying to live in poverty and leech off of the rest of us. Indeed, the reason for our economic decline may be that so many people want the benefits of being poor that they are dragging the economy down with them. We need to stop this rush to be poor before it is too late. So the First Lady should stop visiting soup kitchens and serving them gourmet food, which just encourages them. Only by making poverty less enticing can we hope to to save our economy.

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Bobby Jindal: America's Slumdog Millionaire

After President Obama's doom and gloom speech last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's response was as inspiring as the feel-good movie of the year, Slumdog Millionaire, about a plucky Indian who is poor but happy and doesn't need some government program to give him a million dollars. All he has to do is answer a few questions that uncannily parallel his life on the quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? While President Obama and the Democrats are telling people that they will just help them keep their heads above water, Republicans want to give everyone a shot at the big prize. Who wants to be a millionaire? We all do.

Gov. Jindal's stories of self-reliance were inspiring. Like Michelle Malkin, who is a big fan of his, he is an anchor baby whose parents arrived here from India to exploit our lax immigration laws but nevertheless proved that people who are different races can be successful if they make an effort to fit in and act like real Americans. Instead of acting angry and entitled like some minorities do, Gov. Jindal was so happy and optimistic I thought he was about to bounce up and down like Tigger the way Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle did when he won the Oscar. Gov. Jindal is America's real-life slumdog millionaire.

But what really inspired me was the story he told about how people in leaky little boats tried to save the citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina even though government bureaucrats tried to stop them. If the government had stayed out of New Orleans entirely and encouraged more people to use their boats or to make their own boats out of things around the house, more people would probably be alive today. And instead of waiting for inefficient government workers to fix the levies, ordinary New Orleans citizens could have patched them up using bubble gum and duct tape and good old American know-how.

Instead of relying on the government to build magical magnetic levitation trains, the people of Las Vegas should be encouraged to bring some tools from their garages and build the train themselves, the way the Amish do. And while it's true that the magical levitation part might prove to be technologically difficult for the average Las Vegas citizen, if they all put their minds together and pray, I bet they would be able to levitate the trains. The power of prayer worked for Gov. Jindal when he and a few friends exorcised some demons and cured a woman of cancer back when he was in college so it could probably work for trains, too. And praying may also be the answer to our health care crisis.

And instead of having bureaucrats build roads and bridges why not let people build their own roads and bridges? With all of the companies laying off people and outsourcing jobs to Gov. Jindal's native country, there are plenty of people with time on their hands looking for something to do during the day. It would give people a sense of accomplishment and distract them from worrying about how they will pay the mortgage or pay for health care for their children.

Gov. Jindal also criticized money that is being spent under the stimulus plan to watch volcanoes. Why would you need to pay people to watch a volcano? Isn't it pretty obvious when a volcano erupts? I don't think I need a government bureaucrat to tell me that lava is pouring out of a volcano and that I should probably get out of there as soon as possible. If some people don't get the message, then citizens with lava-proof boats can rescue them – if government bureaucrats just stay out of their way.

President Obama also proposed that we should spend even more money on education. But instead of wasting all of that money, we should be encouraging more home schooling, which is a lot easier now that we have Wikipedia. And instead of sending their kids to expensive colleges, parents could be encouraged to home college their kids, too. Many college-age kids are still living at home anyway because they can't afford to move out so home colleging would give them something to do besides playing video games all day. And besides as the hero of Slumdog Millionaire showed us, you don't necessarily have to be educated to look smart.

Finally, the best part of Gov. Jindal's speech was when he talked about tax cuts. Cutting taxes for 95% of Americans as Pres. Obama promises is extremely unfair to the 5% of Americans who work hard, too, but already pay a lot more taxes than everyone else does despite all of their efforts to shield their assets in offshore accounts. Somebody needs to represent the 5% minority of people who are discriminated against by Obama's tax plan. Gov. Jindal and the new Republican leader Michael Steele understand what it's like to be minorities so it is no surprise that they are willing to stand up for the minority of people who make more than $250,000 a year like bank executives who are often the victims of bigotry in the liberal media. Most Americans want our millionaires to do well because someday we may win the lottery or appear on a quiz show and become millionaires ourselves.

Although I have been pretty down ever since Obama became president and the stock market plunged, Gov. Jindal's quiz show optimism is infectious and I'm glad he's the Republican Party's final answer to our electoral woes. I'm so inspired I think I'm going to start building a boat.

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President Bush's Legacy: One of Our Greatest Presidents

As I recently predicted, in few months, with the benefit of hindsight, historians will look back on the Bush presidency as an unalloyed success and consider President Bush to be one of our greatest presidents. Although the White House has sent around its own talking points highlighting the President's accomplishments, I don't think they go far enough. So I have put together my own list of talking points, which should convince anyone why George W. Bush belongs on Mount Rushmore, along with Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and the other guy.

After Hurricane Katrina President Bush kept our cities safe.

In the three years and a half years since Hurricane Katrina not a single American city has been destroyed or partially destroyed. There are more than 10,000 cities in the United States and because of George Bush every single one of them, except for New Orleans, is still largely intact. Of course, no one could have predicted Hurricane Katrina, and if President Clinton had not left us so woefully unprepared, New Orleans would probably be in a lot better shape than it is now. But since Katrina, there have been numerous hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, fires and earthquakes and none of them has gotten out of hand and wiped out an entire city because of the disaster preparedness policies President Bush put in place. For national security reasons we may not know until records are declassified how many other potential disasters, like epidemics or nuclear power plant meltdowns or alien invasions, were averted because of the work that government agencies did behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Presidents don't usually get credit for all the disasters that don't happen. But I think we should congratulate the President for doing a heckuva job on keeping America safe in the years since Katrina.

After the October 2008 stock market correction there have been no Great Depressions.

Although the excesses of the Clinton administration's failed economic policies finally caught up with us in October 2008, in the seven years before this economic downturn the economy was doing really well. Not every President can boast of seven years of prosperity. What's more, even since October there have been no Great Depressions, which means President Bush has given us eight completely depressionless years. Although some credit Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's swift and bold moves after the market tanked for staving off a depression, I think most economists will come to agree that it was Bush's 2001 tax cuts that really kept the economy afloat. Bush's prescient tax cuts lifted up the economy to such a level that any economic downfall just brought us back to where we were before instead plunging us into depression. Meanwhile, because of easy credit during the Bush years, more people had the opportunity to buy the homes of their dreams and live in them for a few years before they had to give them back. If Obama's economic policies do plunge us into a Great Depression, Americans will look back on the relative economic prosperity of the Bush years wistfully and have only themselves to blame.

After Iraq and Afghanistan took a turn for the worse, President Bush kept us from losing any wars.

Although some presidents can claim that they did not lose a war during their administrations, not many presidents can claim that they did not lose two wars. President Bush is leaving office with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still going strong and not lost. In 2007 Iraq almost broke out into civil war because we did not have enough troops in there. Another President might have decided that the War in Iraq was lost and pulled American troops out of there. Not President Bush. By instituting the surge he prevented Iraq from breaking out into civil war and scoring a loss for the U.S. for the first time in our history. What is even more remarkable was that he was able to stave off defeat in Iraq and at the same time keep just enough troops in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from completely retaking the entire country. Quibblers might say that he didn't actually win either conflict outright or that Afghanistan would be in better shape if we had kept more troops there and not invaded Iraq or offer all sorts of other coulda shoulda woulda arguments but the fact is that we didn't lose any wars and Bush deserves credit for that.

After the District Attorney firing scandal, the outing of Valerie Plame and other scandals, President Bush restored integrity to government.

After a few overzealous Justice Department officials trying to restore balance to our justice system, which had been tainted by the partisanship of the Clinton years, went a little overboard in trying to clean house, President Bush immediately took action and patiently convinced those who were responsible to resign eventually. Since that time no district attorneys have been fired for political reasons. In 2003 when CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was compromised, President Bush vowed to get to the bottom of it and eventually Scooter Libby was prosecuted and threatened with jail time until President Bush mercifully decided he had suffered enough and commuted his sentence. Everyone else who was involved was either persuaded to resign or given a very severe talking to. Because of President Bush's bold stand against compromising the identities of members of our intelligence community, for the last five years not a single undercover CIA agent has been outted. There were a number of other scandals, too numerous to mention here, that President Bush took strong and immediate measures to clean up, such as the level of care veterans were receiving at Walter Reed Hospital. As soon as President Bush found out about it, he fixed it and now veterans receive better care there than they have in years. But perhaps President Bush's most remarkable achievement when it comes to restoring honor and dignity to his office is something he didn't do. Many Americans were understandably disillusioned with government after President Clinton violated the sacred trust that had existed for more than 200 years between presidents and their interns. But in the entire eight years President Bush has been in office he did not have sex with a single intern that we know about, which is an extraordinary accomplishment considering how young and pretty and undoubtedly tempting some of those interns are. It is a testament to President Bush's discipline and character that he did not succumb to temptation and history will certainly remember him for that.

After divisive elections President Bush united our country.

When President Bush took office we were a nation starkly divided between blue states and red states, Vice President Al Gore's attempt to steal the election had left many Democrats bitter and unable to get over it and Washington was a city riven by the political partisanship fostered by Clinton's divisive leadership. But by the end of Bush's first year in office this country was united as it never had been before and the President had a 90% approval rating. Although Democrats continued to try to divide this country and exploit every issue for partisan gain, President Bush continued to rise above the fray and worked with Democrats like Sen. Ted Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind and probably some other bills, too, though I can't think of any off the top of my head. He encouraged Democrats to join him in fighting terrorism although some continued to resist and preferred instead to coddle the terrorists. And yet President Bush was able to persuade the American people to elect him to office again over an elitist, French, latte-swilling, wind-surfing, traitorous, terrorist coddling, Iraq War-losing, Genghis Khan-mispronouncing, lesbian-outting, gay marriage-loving, Anti-American liberal. And when Democrats took over both houses of Congress in 2006, he even won them over to his side with his gentle powers of persuasion. In the end Democrats didn't have the heart to really oppose Bush on anything significant at all, going along with him on such issues as whether to end the war in Iraq and whether to allow the NSA to wiretap our phones. It was hard, apparently, for the Democratic leadership to resist President Bush's charms. And so Obama will take office with the country a lot less divided than it was when Bush came in and divisions between red and blue states much less stark than they once were. President Bush promised that he would be a uniter instead of a divider and if you look at the polls, which show Americans more united than they have been in many years, it is clear that President Bush kept his promise.

After Abu Ghraib, President Bush reaffirmed America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions and against torture.

After Abu Ghraib, some America haters used the photographs that soldiers stupidly took of harsh interrogations of prisoners as evidence in their propaganda that the Bush Administration did not care about upholding the Geneva Conventions. But President Bush took decisive action to prosecute the bad apples, mostly soldiers and low-level commanders, who were solely responsible for what went on there to show the world that we take the Geneva Conventions very seriously even though it is just a treaty and not technically binding especially when we are trying to fight an enemy that does not follow its rules. In the wake of 9/11 some presidents might have been tempted to ignore the Geneva Conventions completely and do whatever was necessary to protect us, but President Bush knew that we couldn't totally abandon all of our ideals in the War on Terror and so he followed the Geneva Conventions to the letter, applying its rules to every soldier who was not an enemy combatant outside the treaty's jurisdiction. And he strongly reaffirmed this nation's stance against torture, preferring instead to waterboard suspected terrorists instead of torturing them, and sending particularly difficult cases to countries where they unfortunately don't have our strong ideals. And even at Guantanamo, which technically is outside the jurisdiction of our laws, President Bush made sure that every prisoner was given due process even if it is understandably taking a while to decide what process they are due. During his entire term of office President Bush never wavered once in maintaining publicly that America does not torture. In fact, I think President Bush may have said, "We do not torture" more than any President in American history.

After 9/11 President Bush kept America safe from terrorist attacks on American soil.

Surely, President Bush's greatest accomplishment, and the one achievement he will most be remembered for in history, was that he kept America safe from terrorist attacks after 9/11. Seven years without a single terrorist attack on American soil is certainly a remarkable accomplishment. The fact that the Clinton Administration's foreign policy blunders left America vulnerable to the worst terrorist act in our nation's history will always be a black mark against President Clinton in the history books, while President Bush's quick and decisive action to correct those mistakes after 9/11 is what he will always be remembered for. And we will probably not know for many years until records are declassified how many shoe bombers and wannabe jihadists were stopped in their tracks. Unfortunately, seven years was just not enough time to capture those responsible for the attacks, but he certainly has Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda on the run. I'm sure Obama will try to take credit if he does capture Bin Laden, but no one can take away from President Bush the credit he is due for keeping America completely safe from terrorist attacks for seven years, eight if you don't count 9/11, which wasn't really his fault. Based on that accomplishment alone, can anyone doubt that George W. Bush was one of our greatest presidents?

Vote for Jon Swift here in the 2008 Weblog Awards.

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