As I work today, I’m listening to Rush Limbaugh rant about charity for the poor. An actual quote from a few minutes ago….
We didn’t teach ’em to fish–we gave ’em the fish! We didn’t teach ’em how to butcher — how to slaughter a cow for the butter!
(Updated) The transcription of the entire rant is up on Limbaugh’s own site now. With typically drug-addled logic, he uses a report showing an epidemic of obesity among the poor — which any rational individual would understand to be the result of high-fat, low-nutrition diets — to conclude that we are, as a society, giving too much to the poor. And from this premise, the drug-addled host then dismisses the problem of — wait for it — starvation in Africa.
And so now we find out that there’s obesity and all this amongst the poor, more than amongst those who are not poor. It’s sort of a textbook case of what happens when we let liberals have their way. I mean, for decades all over the world we’ve been beat about the head that there are hungry people out there , that there are starving kids.
UNICEF? How many of you have trick-or-treated for UNICEF? Did you trick-or-treat for UNICEF, Brian? Did you? We all trick-or-treated. It’s one of the biggest scams on the face of the earth. The scam was to get everybody loving the United Nations. The scam was to get everybody thinking the United Nations is feeding poor people. Remember all these stories “A dime a day will feed 20 kids” in some outward place around the world, or 25 cents a day? Audrey Hepburn, Sally Strothers, all these people did it. I love Sam Kinison’s bit on all this. Sam Kinison did a riff on Sally Strothers, and she’s over there standing next to these poor kids in Africa with flies buzzing all around them, and they’re starving. You can see it by their appearance, and Sally Strothers is looking into the camera.
“Won’t you help? Don’t you care? Can’t you just make one phone call, a dollar a day will feed X numbers of hundreds of thousands of these people,” and Sam Kinison says, “You’re not sitting there hungry. I can see it looking at you. I know you’re not starving over there. You’ve probably got a picnic basket! Give that kid your sandwich; feed that kid! That kid is starving.” I laughed myself silly because it was classic. Here are these liberals right next to all these starving people doing television shows telling people thousands of miles away that they don’t care. “Can’t you help? Won’t you help?” You know, the underlying thought was: You slothful, lazy, cold-hearted bum!
Won’t you get off the couch and at least make a phone call? Well, it’s what happens when you let the left run things. We’ve been beat on the head. There are hungry people everywhere; UNICEF got it all started. We’ve seen the babies with the extended tummies, the walking skeletons, told that kids can’t learn unless they’re fed. We’ve been guilted into pouring resources on the problem, and now the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished because we are sympathetic; we are compassionate people; we’ve responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity, at least here in America. We didn’t teach them how to fish. We gave them the fish. We didn’t teach them how to slaughter the cow to get the butter. We gave them the butter. The real bloat here as we know is in government.
You should really go read the whole thing. It’s an extraordinary example of what passes for thought on the right.