Rank hypocrisy

In the 'I've got mine, fuck you, poor people' attitude of the Republicans who then turn and demand pet projects be paid for by taxpayers' dollars.

Mark Schmitt for the Guardian:

This, not Larry Craig's awkwardly closeted sexuality, is the hypocrisy that matters. This hypocrisy consists not in a failure to reconcile public and private life, but in two public positions that are in absolute contradiction to one another: The belief that people must make it on their own, with no "whining" and no help from government, coexisting with a staggering, slavish dependence on government - and the federal government, and thus taxpayers of the rest of America, in particular.

In a foreshadowing of Risch's comment about the New Orleans victims, the author Marc Reisner, whose 1986 book Cadillac Desert is the finest account of these Western politics, quotes one of the Teton dam's earlier opponents about the culture of this part of Idaho: they "get burned up when they hear about someone buying a bottle of mouthwash with food stamps. But they love big water projects. They only object to nickle-and-dime welfare. They love it in great big gobs."

This is the culture in which American conservatism - from Barry Goldwater's Arizona to Ronald Reagan's southern California, to George Bush's Texas, where great wealth was made possible because the government subsidized money losing oil companies - was bred. It is a culture of self-delusion and hypocrisy that excuses great cruelty. And it's far more dangerous than a poor old man in airport lavatory.