Jim DeMint

So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

Cross-posted from Facing South with author Sue Sturgis's permission

There was a cryptic moment in the emotional press conference South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford held last week to apologize for committing adultery.

"C Street," Sanford said, is where men face "hard questions."

Later, in response to a question from a reporter, the Republican governor and former congressman said that he had been to "what we called 'C Street' when I was in Washington."

I know he isn't a North Carolina Senator, but I caught this bit of drama played out by Republican South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint during the debate over the Lily Ledbetter Act. I think he has a bit of trouble understanding what discrimination is, don't you?