What should be done with the Children of Looters?

Idol Theory:

Watch your television and you will see the scum of the earth wading through water along with their children, to loot Jewry stores, clothing stores and every-other store imaginable, often not for food or water or blankets, but for jewelry, television sets and fancy clothing.

I have written before on other blogs about idol theory, but here it is fresh in its most concise and simplified form.

Republicans have a strong tendancy to create straw men to attack, and then link these unlikable characters with Democrats. Their policies are formed around these characters, and the unending hatred of people like Rush Limbaugh is based around them. Republicans have a whole cast of people they love to hate including welfare dads, promiscuous serial abortionists, and bathhouse-cruising HIV+ child-recruiting homosexuals. These characters are rare, if indeed they exist at all, and yet Republicans shape their policy entirely around such characters.

Conservatives hate welfare and think it should be abolished. When asked why it's so horrible that the government help out people trying to get a new job that pays enough to stay alive, they point to "welfare daddies." These excreable characters get one or more female partners pregnant, then live off the welfare generated by the presence of children without attempting to maintain emplyment. These lazy bastards are the scum of the earth, not worth living, and to avoid their existence, welfare should be abolished entirely.

Nevermind that welfare has a lot of practical benefits. Nevermind that it helps people go to college and maintain their lives while they gain employment to pay off their debts. Ignore the fact that most people on welfare are doing their best and trying to make ends meet. Republicans believe that everyone on welfare must be like these anti-responsibility caricatures; therefor, the policy should be abolished.

What is happening is that Republicans are focusing entirely on the philosophy of a policy, rather than its actual effects. The idea that somebody would take money from the government, live off it for a month while they get things in order, and then not use it again seem patently ludicrous to republicans. If you can get free money, what reason would you have to work? The philosophy of it seems bad, when stared at from the conservative point of view. They never check the results of the policy -- they never see that it actually helps people without creating these so-called "welfare daddies."

Thus, the philosophy of the republican idol -- these straw men representing the flaws in a philosophy are villified endlessly, and the fact that they virtually do not exist is swept under the rug. And now we have a new idol to spew vitriol at -- Katrina looters.

These people should have left, but instead they hung around with their eight kids to loot jewelry stores. These people do not exist -- the people marching into grocery stores to find things they need to survive are doing just that. If anyone is stealing from Best Buy, then it is reprehensible, but it's not a big deal. It looks like The Day After Tomorrow in New Orleans right now, and in such a post-apocolyptic landscape, it must be hard to convince yourself that Wal*Mart really cares about that lousy PS2.

Technorati tags: republican idol, idol theory, katrina