8/27/2014

GOP Great Black Hope Ben Carson: The Government Should Run Child Care Centers

The Rude Pundit has no love for Dr. Ben Carson, the black neurosurgeon admired on the right because he's black and says that Obamacare is worse than 9/11 and "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery." So, obviously, many conservatives want him to run for president because, really, why the fuck not?

Imagine the Rude Pundit's shock then when he was a-persuin' today's scribble-scrabble by Carson. Oh, sure, the good doctor starts by saying some worthless bullshit about the shooting of Michael Brown, which boils down to that it was Brown's fault. That's about as surprising as watching Mitch McConnell laugh with a bunch of rich people about not raising the minimum wage. You'd be shocked if you heard the opposite.

But then he got to this section, where Carson proposes solutions to helping poor African Americans out of poverty, spurred on by some vague conservative economic policies that will totally bring in cash money: "[W]e should devote some of the tax revenues generated to child-care facilities that would allow many of those unwed mothers to get their General Education Development or higher degree and become self-supporting. There are also a number of programs across the nation that offer free classes that teach social and job skills, which would give many of the young men some different options."

Now if you know anything about, oh, say, the last 40 or so years of Republican policies, you would understand that the proper response is "Did that fuckin' worshiped conservative just seriously propose government-run child care centers and job training programs? The shit that liberals, and especially feminists, have been calling on for fuckin' years? Are you shitting us?"

No, we are not being shitted. Carson continues, "We must concentrate on these kinds of programs because we cannot afford to lose large segments of our society to despair and underachievement in an increasingly competitive world." No shit, Ben. That's exactly what we've been saying since, oh, fuck, the War on Poverty, maybe earlier. It was Republican fucksacks like, well, everyone who loves Ben Carson who prevented any of that from existing (or helped it fail through budget cuts).

Fer chrissakes, in the current election, Republicans are running on providing a bigger tax credit to help people get child care for their kids, which totally will benefit people who don't earn enough to pay taxes in the first place. One of fuckin' Paul Ryan's great and magnificently useless budgets proposed slashing the federal dollars going to child care. The Bush administration just kept giving money to church groups to take care of the problem.

But here is Ben Carson, mentioned constantly as a voice of reason (even if he is mostly bugfuck crazy) and a beloved speaker on the right, taking a position that is, truly, to the left of what many Democrats would dare to propose. He's not talking about subsidizing child care. He is talking about Big Government taking care of your children, which is a way more socialistic proposition than the terrorism that Carson believes Obamacare is.

So now can we have an actual conversation about programs that actually can get actual poor people out of poverty? Is it safe now that a well-known right-winger has said it?