Elder Abuse
by digby
Hey grandma, Rick Santorum thinks you’re a junkie:
“Americans love entitlements, and once we get you hooked on an entitlement, you’ll never let it go…Sounds like nothing more than trying to hook someone like a drug dealer … Isn’t that what entitlements do? Make you dependent. Make you feel less. Make you want less. What we’re doing to this generation of America, this entitlement attitude, if that is not a moral issue, I don’t know what is.”
Right. Americans are “hooked” on food, shelter and medicine, the immoral bastards.
Does Rick Santorum know that everyone gets old and sick? And does he know that when that happens you cannot work for a living anymore? Or that if you become disabled and cannot work that it’s very hard to earn money? It doesn’t sound like he does. In fact, from what he says, he believes that people get old and sick for the express purpose of stealing hard earned money from Real Americans like Rick Santorum and if only we would take away this temptation they would live forever.
On the other hand, maybe that whole Death Panel thing was a projection — it’s the Republicans who are for them except they are going to be less bureaucratic about it. They’re just going to consign all old and sick people who don’t have enough money to pay for themselves to die. It’s simpler that way. More “democratic.” And Lord knows it will save us all a lot of money so the truly productive citizens (the wealthy) can be even more “productive” than they already are.
Whatever the real intent, I hope they keep it up. The elderly are the only growing Republican demographic and as the boomers enter it the usual racist misanthropy probably isn’t going to have quite the salience it once had. They might want to think a little bit before calling people on Social Security and Medicare “junkies.” They could easily get the wrong idea.
*Evidently Santorum and his ilk are unaware that before Social Security 50% of elderly Americans lived in poverty which is not surprising since they often cannot work. The sick just died. But perhaps these folks believe we could use a little culling of the herd.
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