Bush Voters and Poverty

This is an excerpt from another must-read editorial from NY Times' Bob Herbert on one of the real "values" issues that has painfully fallen through the cracks of this self-righteous country:

"The federal government has not raised the minimum wage since 1997, and has made it easier for some employers to deny time-and-a-half pay to employees who work overtime."

"Franklin Roosevelt, in his second Inaugural Address, told a rain-soaked crowd, 'The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.'"

"I can hear the politicians in today's Washington having a hearty laugh at that sentiment.

"There are advocates and even some politicians hard at work addressing the myriad problems faced by beleaguered workers and their families. But they get very little in the way of attention or resources from the most powerful sectors of society. So the health care workers who can't afford health insurance will continue emptying bedpans for a pittance. And the janitors will clean up faithfully after the big shots who ignore them.

"These are rough times for the American dream. But times change, and the people who have broken faith with the dream won't be in power forever."

I wonder what FDR would think of the thieves we have running the country now. I wonder what he would say about their values.
More importantly, why did millions of these impoverished, and underpaid Americans vote for Bush? And why aren't they paying attention to the real "values" issues?
It is funny to me that Republicans, the party of self-interest, have so successfully won over so many of the voters that their policies have disenfrachised.
It is because of the bogeymen they create: mass abortions, a plague of gay marriages, taking 'under God' from the nation's pledge. These are all issues that are rarely a direct part of most of these people's lives, and yet the Republicans convince them that the liberal heathens are ready to kill babies in their front yards while being sodomized by your son that they just turned gay, all the while burning your Bible over a spitfire made from the bones of your grandma, which the liberals ate, making a toast to her delicate flesh with a glass of chablis.
Oh, yes we liberals have lots of fun, while the financially poor Bush voters just keeping getting poorer and poorer.

Posted by Paul Hina at November 22, 2004 10:27 PM