One thing that should outrage everyone in this country is that there are millions of Americans going hungry or worrying that they may go hungry.  What is outrageous is that it doesn’t have to be this way at all.  The United States doe not have a food shortage or a wealth shortage.  Theoretically, its citizenry does not lack in compassion. In practice though, its citizens have let one minority political party decide that the hungry and food insecure people, families and children should have their already inadequate food assistance cut even more.  The republicans in congress, self-proclaimed and self-righteous Christians, have gotten their way twice in the past 3 months in congress, managing to get in two cuts to the federal food stamp program now know as S.N.A.P.

The first cut to the food assistance program came this past November, just in time for the holidays.  Republicans let expire, by refusing to renew, the emergency, extra food stamp funding that was included as part of the economic stimulus of 2009 after the start of the financial industry caused Great Recession.  An article yesterday on the website Think Progress  cited a report from Food Bank New York City that described the impact of the food stamp cut in November on food pantries in New York, which resulted in many food banks running out of food and having to turn people away. ( http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/23/3195501/york-city-food-pantries-food-stamps/).  Food pantries and charities across the country had similar experiences over the holidays as they attempted to fill in the increased need caused by the republican sadism.  Fox Propaganda pundit Bill O’Reilly took to the airwaves over the holiday season saying that Jesus wouldn’t be down for the food stamp program because it was helping one group (the hungry) by hurting the other group (the rest of us).

Bill O’Reilly’s absurd and offensive comments are one of the best examples I recall lately that so beautifully demonstrates the outright vile hypocrisy of the republican party that tries to claim the moral high ground on social policy by identifying themselves as Christians with family values.  These fucking scumbags have not only waged a war on the working class, demonized the poor, and chastised the new Pope for criticizing their true god of greed that they call “capitalism” – these lying sacks of rotten dog shit, phony Christian posers have now literally cut the food supply to the poor even further, while claiming to have Jesus on their side.

The second round of cuts to the food stamp program has just been pushed through by the republicans, with the help of capitulating, pathetic democrats seeking a ‘compromise.’  Their claim to compromise is that they agreed to only 10 billion dollars in cuts to food stamps over the next decade instead of the whopping 40 billion dollars that the tea bagging House Republicans were seeking.  With no shortage of food in this country, and in fact with an overabundance of food helped in part by government subsidies to industrial farming, and with no shortage of wealth, and no shortage of bombs to drop on other countries, it cannot be called a compromise to further cut back food assistance to the poor in this country.  In fact, the only thing these democrats deserve to be called for the “compromise’  is COWARDS.  These same, near worthless ensemble of impotent, wet-mop democrats also managed to let the republicans dupe them into a ‘compromise’ over the holidays on the budget that did not include extending unemployment benefits, which of course republicans have now refused to do.  Bill O’Reilly’s Jesus must be smiling down from heaven in pride at what Bill’s colleague on Fox,  Sean Hannity calls “the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.”

Republicans have succeeded far too long in getting away with this claim that they are a political party of God and country, of Jesus and family values.  Liberals and democrats have let them get away with this for too long and taken a defensive posture until recently.  The super-wealthy power systems that run our country have managed through a variety of sophisticated propaganda techniques over the years to get many Americans to demonize and blame the poor, and to vote against their own best interests.  One of the tricks employed has been to play on the prejudices of people, and to exploit their religious beliefs.  The republican party is the model for this type of cynical propaganda. They’ve brought their game of deception a long ways over the past three decades, from President Ronald Reagan’s portrayal of the poor as Cadillac driving, black “welfare queens” and able bodied, unwilling to work “cowboys” eating steak on food stamps, up to the present, with Bill O”Reilly claiming Christ’s endorsement of cutting off the food supply to the hungry.

The republican party has also played on the religious beliefs of their voters as well, from abortion to gay marriage.  They have solidified a large voting block of conservative Christians with images of aborted fetuses and professions of commitment to the “sanctity of life” which of course they mean the fetus, or group of cells at conception.  They have solidified this support even though the republican party’s actual support of that life at conception ends with it’s birth into babyhood and childhood.  Cut the food stamps, cut the welfare, cut the school lunches, cut the healthcare, it’s the parent’s lazy fault if the child suffers.  That child who’s “sanctity of life” they pretended to care so much about before it was born for the purpose of motivating the compassionate conservatives to vote for them because they are against abortion.

Reasonable gun control, such as universal background checks on all gun sales, which has overwhelming public support, has been successfully thwarted as well by the gun lobby and republicans.  What strikes out at me is how the republican propaganda of God and country filters into the gun control debate on social media, such as Facebook.  Despite high profile school shootings of children, what lingers around now is not outrage over how control has once again been defeated.  What lingers around now are recycled, simplistic answers to gun violence:  it’s because we took God out of the public schools!  Gun violence in schools is apparently the fault of lack of  prayer in schools, or because of leaving God out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

But, what pisses me off the most at this moment, as I sit here comfortably fed, living in a wealthy country with a surplus food supply and a population that likes to think of itself as exceptional, compassionate, moral, Christian, family value oriented, and caring of children and the sanctity of their life, is the fact that our democratically elected government is actually deciding to cut food assistance to its most needy even more than it already has.  It pisses me off that the supposedly progressive democratic party is so utterly worthless sometimes when it comes to taking up for even the most basic causes of a progressive society, such as feeding its poor and needy, and helping its unemployed during a historically bad economic time.  So do me a favor, the next time a friend or neighbor is talking politics and supporting the republicans or just bashing the democrats, remind them that people in this country are going hungry because the political party they support has decided to deliberately and literally, take the food out of the hands of hungry children, women and men.  And that they claim it’s the way Jesus wants.