Compassionate conservative

[quaoar]

Courtesy of Mark Steyn. This guy should be dragged behind a 18-wheeler from Maine to California so he can get a good view of the Two Americas.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/11/do1109.xml


It is standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness.

Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years. There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous.

[dflprincess]

1. Remind me in November to send this guy a link

to the local charities and media that run an annual "Coats for Kids" drive. A $9.99 quilted coat? Maybe that will get you through a winter in northern Florida - I doubt if it will do much in Minnesota.