In “The President, Fox News and the Poor” Mr. Blow says Obama was right to call out the media’s poverty narratives. There are people who want something for nothing — but they cut across the income spectrum. Mr. Kristof, in “Crisis at Sea,” says American and Asian officials seem determined to avert their eyes as the toll climbs in the Rohingya refugee crisis. Ms. Collins states the obvious when she writes “Wow, Jeb Bush is Awful.” She says as a presidential hopeful, Jeb’s most attractive feature used to be an aura of competence, but that changed this week. Here’s Mr. Blow:
This week, during a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Obama lambasted the media, and in particular Fox News, for creating false, destructive narratives about the poor that paint them broadly as indolent and pathological.
The president said:
“Over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.”
He continued:
“And, look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu — they will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. [Laughter.] They’re like, I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obama phone — [laughter] — or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative — right? — that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress — which is much more typical — who’s raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took umbrage. After saying that “the arrogance of it all is staggering,” and that he was “a little embarrassed” for the president, Scarborough demanded of his befuddled panel: “What about the specific clip about Fox News calling poor people leeches, sponges and lazy? Have you ever heard that on Fox News?” One panelist responded, “No, I have not.” Then Scarborough opened the question to them all: “Has anybody ever heard that on Fox News?”
Well, yes.
In 2004, Bill O’Reilly, arguably the face of Fox News, said: “You gotta look people in the eye and tell ‘em they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.”
In 2012, O’Reilly listed what he called the “true causes of poverty” including “poor education, addiction, irresponsible behavior and laziness.”
In 2014, during the week that marked the 50th anniversary of L.B.J.’s “War on Poverty,” O’Reilly again said that “true poverty” (as opposed to make-believe poverty?) “is being driven by personal behavior,” which included, according to him, “addictive behavior, laziness, apathy.”
Even though the president didn’t say that Fox News specifically used the words “sponge,” “leeches” and “lazy,” O’Reilly has indeed, repeatedly, called poor people lazy, and the subtext of his remarks is that many poor people are pathologically and undeservedly dependent on the government dole.
Now who should be embarrassed for whom?
As for the president’s mention of the “Obama phones,” in 2012,FoxNews.com reported on “a viral video of an Obama supporter touting her ‘Obama phone.’” But even they had to admit that the program — Lifeline — was not created under Obama. According to the site: “But even though some beneficiaries may credit President Obama for providing the phones, Lifeline is an extension of a program that has existed since 1985.” Who was president in 1985? Oh, that’s right, the conservatives’ golden, do-no-wrong “Gipper,” Ronald Reagan.
By the way, O’Reilly’s mythology concerning addiction must also be confronted. In February, ThinkProgress gathered data from the seven states that drug-test applicants for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, also know as welfare. The site found this:
“The statistics show that applicants actually test positive at a lower rate than the drug use of the general population. The national drug use rate is9.4 percent. In these states, however, the rate of positive drug tests to total welfare applicants ranges from 0.002 percent to 8.3 percent, but all except one have a rate below 1 percent.”
The problem with all of this is that these misconceptions have a way of seeping into the populace as a whole.
For Fox’s part, they responded by having Stuart Varney, who works for Fox News and Fox Business Network, comment. Varney said: “I think the president is spinning the failure of his own policies, and I think he is blaming us, and I think we are an honest messenger.”
Stop laughing, people! There’s more. Varney continued:
“Look at food stamps for a second. We’ve been asking why is it that after six years of so-called recovery there are still 12 million more people on food stamps today than when the president took office. Why is that? Surely, that’s the failure of the president’s policy. What about Obama phones? Why is it that we’re giving away 13 million Obama phones after six years of recovery? Why are we doing that?”
Never once did Varney address the many times that O’Reilly called poor people lazy or acknowledge that “Obama phones” might be more aptly called “Reagan phones.”
And let’s make sure that we better understand participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.According to SNAP to Health, whose founding supporters were the Aetna Foundation and the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress:
“Stigma associated with the SNAP program has led to several common misconceptions about how the program works and who receives the benefits. For instance, many Americans believe that the majority of SNAP benefits go towards people who could be working. In fact, more than half of SNAP recipients are children or the elderly. For the remaining working-age individuals, many of them are currently employed. At least forty percent of all SNAP beneficiaries live in a household with earnings. In fact, the majority of SNAP households do not receive cash welfare benefits (around 10 percent receive cash welfare), with increasing numbers of SNAP beneficiaries obtaining their primary source of income from employment.”
This information is not hard to find or relay, but that would not fit the anti-Obama narrative. In the 2012 primaries, Newt Gingrich gained quite a bit of traction referring to Obama as the “the best food stamp president in American history.” This idea, including its latent racial connotations, lives on because it confirms an us-versus-them, takers-versus-makers sensibility.
Obama was right to call out the media’s poverty narratives. There are people across the income spectrum who are lazy and addicted and want something for nothing. But it’s unfair and untenable to pretend this is the sole purview of the poor. Negative behavior doesn’t necessarily spring from a lack of money, but rather exposes a lack of character.
Next up we have Mr. Kristof:
One of the world’s most beautiful regions, the seas of Southeast Asia — home to sparkling white beaches and $7,000-a-night beach villas — is becoming a scene of a mass atrocity.
Thousands of refugees from the persecuted Rohingya minority in Myanmar, fleeing modern concentration camps at home, have fled to sea in boats, and many have drowned. Fearing a crackdown, smugglers have abandoned some of those boats at sea, and neighboring countries are pushing the boats back to sea when they try to land.
The Obama administration, which has regarded Myanmar as one of its diplomatic successes, is largely unhelpful as this calamity unfolds.
“The Andaman Sea is about to become a floating mass grave, and it’s because of the failure of governments, including our own, to do what is necessary,” says Tom Andrews, a former member of Congress who is president of United to End Genocide. “Not only is there not a search-and-rescue operation going on right now — with thousands out to sea — but governments are towing these people out from their shores back to open sea, which is tantamount to mass murder.”
One appalling chapter of World War II came when the SS St. Louis left Germany in 1939 full of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Cuba and the United States barred them from disembarking, and — after passing so close to Miami that passengers could see the lights on shore — the ship returned to Europe, where many died in the Holocaust.
Now refugees fleeing concentration camps are again denied landfall.
“We’re talking about a flotilla of St. Louises, and people are going to die,” Andrews told me.
Rohingyas are a Muslim minority reviled by the majority Buddhist population in Myanmar. The government has confined some 150,000 of them to 21st-century concentration camps: I visited these camps last year and wrote about starving children and camp inmates dying for lack of medical care.
On Wednesday, there were unconfirmed reports of 20 Rohingya-owned shops being burned down in Maungdaw in western Myanmar near the border with Bangladesh.
The United Nations says that more than 130,000 Rohingyas have fled by sea since 2012. Many fall prey to human smugglers who torture, rape and starve them in Thai camps until relatives pay ransom. The discovery of a mass grave this month from one such camp embarrassed Thai authorities into cracking down on human smugglers, leading the crews to abandon the ships, with their human cargo adrift at sea.
Chris Lewa of The Arakan Project, a human rights group, said she has been in cellphone contact with two ships full of refugees, and she suspects that there are more farther from land and thus out of cellphone range. One is drifting without engines or adequate food, and she, as a private citizen, has been frantically trying to organize a search-and-rescue effort to save the passengers — so far, unsuccessfully.
Come on! If a suspected terrorist were on board, intelligence agencies would use that cellphone number to locate that boat. But 350 desperate refugees adrift at sea, and we’re going to shrug and let them drown?
Governments are probably uninterested in rescuing refugees for fear that they would then have to take them in. Thailand has long had a policy of sending refugee boats on their way, and Indonesia this week pushed two ships carrying hundreds of Rohingya back to sea. As for Malaysia, “we won’t let any foreign boats come in,” an admiral said.
Europe also has a refugee crisis, but at least European countries are mounting search-and-rescue operations to try to save lives. What Southeast Asian governments are doing is the opposite.
As a first step, President Obama should call the leaders of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, urging them to rescue and shelter refugees. The United States can also use military and intelligence assets to locate drifting refugee ships and assist with search and rescue.
Obama must also make clear that Myanmar cannot have a normal relationship with the United States as long as it engages in crimes against humanity. Just this month, the administration welcomed to the White House a senior official of the Myanmar government, Thura Shwe Mann, who has allied himself with extremist anti-Rohingya positions. In its statement afterward, the White House’s press office even avoided using the word “Rohingya,” apparently so as not to offend Myanmar.
That’s craven, but what’s worse is the way American and Asian officials alike seem determined to avert their eyes from atrocities in one of the world’s most beautiful regions.
“People are dying at sea,” said Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights, a human rights group that has done excellent work monitoring the Rohingya. “We know that, right now. And it could worsen considerably in the coming weeks.”
And now here’s Ms. Collins:
Let’s discuss Jeb Bush’s terrible week.
I’m really troubled by his awful performances, and I’m generally a person who takes bad news about politicians pretty well. For instance, a friend just sent me a story about the Texas agriculture commissioner’s vow to bring deep-fried foods back to school cafeterias. (“It’s not about French fries; it’s about freedom.”) I would classify this as interesting, yet somehow not a shocking surprise.
But today we’re talking about Jeb Bush. As a presidential hopeful, Bush’s most attractive feature was an aura of competence. Extremely boring competence, perhaps. Still, an apparent ability to get through the day without demonstrating truly scary ineptitude.
Then, about a week ago, The Washington Post reported that during a private meeting with rich Manhattan financiers, Bush announced that his most influential adviser on Middle Eastern matters was his brother George.
This was a surprise on many fronts. For one thing, Jeb had apparently missed the memo on how everything you say to potential donors at private meetings can wind up on an endless YouTube loop for all eternity.
Also, he had begun his all-but-announced campaign for the presidency with an “I’m my own man” sales pitch. Now he was saying, in effect, “Well, I can always ask my brother.”
Then, on Monday, Fox News aired an interview in which host Megyn Kelly asked Jeb whether “knowing what we know now” he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq.
“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,” Bush replied.
Now no one, including Hillary Clinton’s worst enemy in the entire world, thinks that if she could go back in time to 2002, knowing that the invasion of Iraq was going to be a total disaster and that she would lose the presidential nomination in 2008 to a guy who ran on that very issue, she would still have voted to authorize the use of force. So, obviously, Bush misheard the question, right?
Apparently not. He then went on: “I mean, so just for the news flash to the world if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”
We had now learned that: 1) Jeb Bush still thinks invading Iraq was a good idea; and 2) he has inherited more of the family syntax issues than we knew.
Fast-forward one day: “I interpreted the question wrong, I guess,” Bush told Sean Hannity in a radio interview. “I was talking about given what people knew then, would you have done it, rather than knowing what we know now. And knowing what we know now, you know, clearly there were mistakes.”
He still didn’t claim that he’d have done anything different than his brother had done. (“That’s a hypothetical.”) But he was really nailing down that business about mistakes.
Then Bush was off to Nevada, campaigning in his own special way. (“I’m running for president in 2016, and the focus is going to be about how we, if I run, how do you create high sustained economic growth.”)
He also announced that hypothetical questions were a “disservice” to the U.S. troops and their families.
What is going on here? It’s not actually about foreign policy. Jeb Bush clearly knows nothing whatsoever about foreign policy, but then neither do the majority of other Republican presidential hopefuls.
The bottom line is that so far he seems to be a terrible candidate. He couldn’t keep his “I’m-my-own-man” mantra going through the spring. He over-babbled at a private gathering. He didn’t know how to answer the Iraq question, which should have been the first thing he tackled on the first day he ever considered that he might someday think for even a minute about running for president.
This is obviously a problem for the Bush camp, but it’s a big one for the nation’s army of concerned citizens, too. There are lots of Americans who are not going to vote Republican next year, but who nevertheless have found some comfort in the idea that Jeb Bush would almost certainly be the Republican nominee.
They might disagree with him on a lot of issues, but at least he wasn’t Ted Cruz. “I’m a fan of Jeb Bush,” Cruz said cruelly, when asked about the Iraq incident. “I’ll give him credit for candor and consistency.”
If the version of Jeb Bush we’ve been seeing lately is the one we’re going to be stuck with, then one of the other Republican contenders is going to win. Maybe the guy who thinks Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery. Or the guy who once linked vaccines to children with mental disorders. The guy who used to peddle a “Diabetes Solution Kit.” The guy with the bridge traffic jam!
Right now, you know, it’s all hypothetical.
