And now for the latest entry from the never ending GOP stupid parade.
From the Huffington Post...
A Republican lawmaker in the Maryland General Assembly said it might be a good idea to take food stamps away from parents if their kids are involved in riots.
"I think that you could make the case that if there is a failure to do proper parenting and allowing this stuff to happen, is there an opportunity for a month to take away your food stamps," Maryland state Del. Pat McDonough said Wednesday during a radio broadcast clipped by The Intercept.
So on top of having the rioters themselves tearing up everything in the neighborhood, Pat McDonough (R - Teabagistan) wants to add even more suffering to the folks affected by the riots by depriving them of their means to sustain themselves. Of course, this kind of tunnel-vision thinking is par for the course for today's GOP, who only seem to govern by whatever petty annoyances they feel are worthy of their attention at the moment. After all, chances are pretty good that neither Mr. McDonough nor his constituents live in any of the neighborhoods affected by the riots. In his mind, it's those people who are the problem and who deserve to be punished.
This is just the latest in the right-wing media's "blame the victim" strategy that has manifest itself in the wake of the Baltimore riots resulting from the mysterious death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. So far the culprits have been Mr. Gray himself (who was apparently able to somehow fracture his own spine in the enclosed space of a police van), bad parenting (which has become the main theme), Black clergy, gangs, Muslims, the Gays (yes, we get some of this too), and of course President Obama. Pretty much the only people who seem to have escaped any responsibility (so far) are the cops who actually took Mr. Gray into custody.
Strange, though, how this riot (and the Ferguson riots) seem to deserve such wall-to-wall "analysis" from the conservative and mainstream media, yet there was no such scrutiny when Kentucky fans rioted after their loss to Wisconsin in this year's NCAA Basketball Tournament.
Nor was there any question of the parenting skills of the fans who tore through Arizona after their loss in 2014's tournament.
And there were no claims "thuggery" when West Virginia University damn near burned down their campus that same year.
Its pretty clear that conservatives and our mainstream (liberal my ass) media are all too willing to give a pass to good ol' all-American White kids who go on a rampage. But when it happens to be Black kids tearing up a neighborhood (even when they're accompanied by a fair amount of White kids), that's when everyone shakes their heads and goes tsk, tsk, tsk at "those" people who just don't know how good they have it.
With another weekend of curfews and protests upcoming, you can count on conservatives like Mr. McDonough, as well as GOP candidates like Rand Paul (whose son is facing his 3rd DUI arrest) to continue to prove their bona-fides to their racist White base, using Baltimore to stoke their customary fear and resentment of "those people" who don't see America as they do.
5:55 AM PT: Correction: William Paul's (Rand's son) DUI incident was the third encounter with the police regarding alcohol. The first two did not involve driving. H/T to DKos reader doc2.