Nothing more 'entertaining' than when the MSM tries to "Preach the Gospel" to us is there?
"We as a nation—a proudly, increasingly loudly Christian nation—have somehow convinced ourselves that the selfish choice is usually the moral one, too. (What a deal!) You know how this works: It's wrong to help poor people because "handouts'' reward dependency and thus hurt more than they help. So, do the right thing—that is, walk right on by—and by all means hang on to your hard-earned cash.
Thus do we deny the working poor a living wage, resent welfare recipients expected to live on a few hundred dollars a month, object to the whopping .16 percent of our GNP that goes to foreign aid—and still manage to feel virtuous about all of the above.
Which is how "Christian'' morality got to be all about other people's sex lives—and incredibly easy lifting compared to what Jesus actually asks of us. Defending traditional marriage? A breeze. Living in one? Less so. Telling gay people what they can't do? Piece o' cake. But responding to the wretched? Loving the unlovable? Forgiving the ever-so-occasionally annoying people you actually know? Hard work, as our president would say, and rather more of a stretch.
A lot of us are angry at our public officials just now, and rightly so. But we are complicit, too; top to bottom, we picked this government, which has certainly met our low expectations.
The Bush administration made deep and then still deeper cuts in antipoverty programs, and we liked that. (The genius of the whole Republican program, in fact, is that it not only offers tax cuts and morality, but tax cuts as morality. Americans do, I think, want to feel they are doing the right thing, and when I hear an opponent of abortion rights say, "I'm voting for the most vulnerable, the unborn,'' I have to respect that. Of course, we also like tax breaks and cheap gas and cranking the thermostat up and down—so when Republicans play to both our better angels and our less altruistic ones, it's not that tough a sell.)"
The Bible, which liberals love to reference but hardly read, actually says a few things about the poor.
For instance:
"For the poor will never cease out of the land." (Deuteronomy 15:11 RSV)
"But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, "Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to Me. For you always have the poor with you." (Matthew 26:10-11 RSV)
We're always going to have the poor. Poverty is in many forms. In New Orleans the focus was on "material poverty", ignoring that the fact that people who exist under the socialistic welfare system of the Democratic party are kept that way for "convience" and "votes".
Now that the left and the MSM has exacerbated the "Sluggish" Federal Response, they now what to lamblast the Administration and by them - the Christian Right- for allowing the poor conditions exist in New Orleans.
Melinda gives us the Sermon that God is more concerned with the poor than with the degradationand debauchery and corruption that many times lead to such conditions.
Melinda would do well to get a Concordance. The fact is that Jesus spoke more of 'personal sins' and "hell" than he did about the poor - a more than 1/300 ratio as a matter of fact.
But to the more secular points:
As to the Bush "cuts", the facts: Via Bill O'Reilly's talking points on the O'Reilly Factor which aired September 14th, 2005:
"Massive neglect? Let's take a look at that bit of overstatement. Halfway through President Clinton's tenure in office in 1996, the poverty rate was 13.7 percent. Halfway through President Bush's tenure, the rate is 12.7 percent, a full point lower.
In 1996, the Clinton budget allotted $191 billion for poverty entitlements. That was 12.2 percent of the budget and a whopping amount of money. That's why Bill Clinton (search) was called the first black president by some.
However, the Bush 2006 budget allots a record shattering $368 billion for poverty entitlements, 14.6 percent of the entire budget, a huge increase over Clinton's spending on poverty entitlements.
Again, the simple fact is that the poor of New Orleans owe their existence to corrupt socialistic/atheistic welfare entitlement programs than anything else, and corrupt - mainly democratic politicians living literally off the bones of the poor living in the New Orleans projects.
Moreover, the real Story of Katrina is that the idea of a Social Welfare state as an abject failure.
Now contrast that with the charity that is being outpoured on the refugees now in large part from faith based intitiatives, and specifically in the RED states and you see the results are very different. Programs that incidently don't create dependency, and helplessness, but foster independance and freedom.
In fact, that's what the refugees are finding out as they begin anew in other places throughout the US - away from the "jail" that was created for them in the "Big Easy".
Filed under Katrina disaster relief new orleans emergency response FEMA
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