SlowpokeBlog

For years now, whenever I've seen a "W" sticker on someone's car, I've wavered between the impulse to label the person a major-league doofus and a more compassionate view of them as a victim of propaganda. That so many people get their knickers in a bunch about other people's purported "laziness," while getting their facts on the issues so horribly mangled, has always struck me as a tremendous double-standard. What I tried to do here was expose the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of the right-wingers' language about welfare by turning it back on them. I imagine some might perceive this cartoon as “elitist” but in fact, they would be perceiving the elitism of their very own rhetoric about the poor.

Speaking of welfare, the Republicans' fixation on it has always struck me as bizarrely out-of-proportion to its actual importance among Issues That Matter. It's not uncommon to hear someone profess Republicanism because they believe their "hard-earned taxpayer dollars should not be given to someone too lazy to work for a living." This is often code for racism under the mistaken idea that most public assistance goes to black "welfare queens." And the amount of your hard-earned dollars going to the poor isn't diddly compared to what's being wasted in Iraq. Personally, I prefer the thought of my taxes going to some poverty-stricken place in rural America (where a majority of welfare dollars are spent) than to crooked contractors in Baghdad. But that's just me.