While most Americans were planning for the annual ritual of overconsumption known as Thanksgiving, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation, America's leading architects of conservative thought for at least three decades, were doing their part to add to the holiday cheer. According to a November 13 Heritage article, well-off revelers could stuff their faces unhampered by guilt about the less fortunate, because there are no longer any hungry people in the United States.
You have to hand it to Heritage for always being first out of the gate to exploit the latest event or finding to advance its aims-this is the same think tank that issued a comprehensive strategy, two weeks after Katrina hit shore, for using the hurricane as an excuse to slash federal social programs. This time, its thinkers found inspiration in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual report on Household Food Security in the United States, which is as close as the federal government comes to providing statistics on hunger among the nation's poor. The latest report states that 11 percent of Americans were "food insecure" for some part of 2006, and 4 percent-11.1 million people-experienced "very low food security."[..]
But the Heritage folks are looking beyond semantic tweaks: Far from having too little to eat, they argue, poor people are eating too much. By the time the USDA report went public, Heritage had readied its own salvo, titled "Hunger Hysteria: Examining Food Security and Obesity in America." In recent years, the U.S. media and public have become increasingly obsessed with the "obesity epidemic." And what better way to attack the idea of deprivation among the poor than to note that they are getting fatter? Rightly or not, people still associate obesity with the sins of gluttony and sloth, which jives nicely with the concept that welfare recipients are lazy people who would rather feed at the public trough than get an honest job.
Must. Resist. Impulse. To. Bang. Head. Against. Keyboard. I've been doing some reading on scientific study of happiness (i.e., how psychology and brain physiology determines our emotional reactions) and I truly believe that the empathy portion of the brain stem must be damaged or missing on conservatives. That's the only way that I can see how they can ignore the facts in front of them to come up with such a condescending and hateful hypothesis like that.
But it appears that the Heritage Foundation feels they are entitled to their own facts, much like the unintentionally hilarious Conservapedia. According to this BloggingHeads segment, Heritage is planning on starting their own version of Crooks&Liars, documenting examples of "liberal" media bias and when conservatives are shown in an unfairly bad light.
Hate to break it to you, fellas, but you put yourselves in a bad light all on your own.
