Go, and do thou likewise.
“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.”
So sayeth Frank Luntz, as neutral a political consultant as you’re ever likely to meet. —And you shake your head and wonder why it’s so damn hard for some people to understand that government’s just a means of making sure that help is pitched whenever it’s needed, to whomever needs it—and then you read it over again and see the work that word, “neighbors,” really does in this sentence: I don’t want to help just anyone, it says. Just the people I like. Just the people like me. —How ugly it becomes, in hands like these.
“I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were onto something,” he says. “Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy Wall Street scares me. Because he didn’t hear what I hear. He doesn’t see what I see.”
