Yet Another Clueless Republican

[Patrick Degan]

Thought Mark Sanford was bad? Meet Adrian Bauer

S.C. politician's welfare remark called ‘immoral’
Candidate for governor likens government aid to feeding stray animals

updated 5:32 p.m. CT, Mon., Jan. 25, 2010

COLUMBIA, S.C. - When things looked their darkest for Gov. Mark Sanford — when he was in danger of being impeached for running off to Argentina to see his mistress — his best insurance policy may well have been South Carolina's lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer.

Lawmakers knew if they removed Sanford, they would end up with Bauer, a fiercely ambitious Republican with a reputation for reckless and immature behavior.

Now Bauer has folks shaking their heads again, after he likened government assistance to the poor to feeding stray animals.

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

Democrats and others railed at him.

'Disgusted'
"I am disgusted by these comments. They show an unbelievable lack of compassion toward the unemployed workers in our state who are hurting during these hard times," said state Sen. Vincent Sheheen, a Democrat who is also running for governor. "His comments were immoral and out of line."

South Carolina schools Superintendent Jim Rex, another Democratic candidate for governor, called Bauer's comments "reprehensible" and said he should apologize.

Bauer said Monday that he regrets his choice of words but that government should expect welfare recipients to try to better themselves. He wants to require them to take drug tests and attend parent-teacher conferences if they have children in school.

A child of divorce who benefited from free lunches himself, Bauer insisted he wasn't bad-mouthing people laid off from work in the recession or advocating taking food from children, but rather emphasizing the need to break the cycle of dependency.

"Do I wish I'd used a different metaphor? Of course I do," the 40-year-old said. "I didn't intend to offend anyone."

Bauer has long been a love-him-or-hate-him figure in South Carolina politics. A nonstop campaigner and self-described workaholic, he was the youngest elected lieutenant governor in the country when he first won the No. 2 spot in 2002 at age 33.

Before his 2006 re-election, he shattered his heel when the single-engine plane he was piloting ran into power lines, crashed and caught fire. Bauer's office said the maintenance company that overhauled the engine botched the job.

During the campaign, it was also disclosed that Bauer had been stopped for speeding twice, but not ticketed, even though in one instance he was going 101 mph in a 70 mph zone. He said he didn't realize how fast he was going and never asked for preferential treatment.

Bauer twice ran on a separate ticket from Sanford and the two have never been chums. In 2006, Sanford's now-estranged wife, Jenny, supported Bauer's primary opponent.

Bauer almost ascended to the top office last summer, after Sanford disappeared from the state for five days to be with his mistress. But the Legislature stopped short of impeachment.

'Fanatical following'
Politicians who had gubernatorial ambitions of their own, or were backing other candidates, knew that replacing Sanford with Bauer would have given the lieutenant governor a year-and-a-half tryout for the job and the benefit of running as an incumbent.

At least three other Republicans and five Democrats have said they are running for governor.

Neal Thigpen, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, said Bauer tends to speak so fast and enthusiastically ("It's almost like a Gatling gun") that he sometimes "gets his mouth in place quicker than his head." Thigpen said the lieutenant governor's latest remarks could hurt him in the general election in the fall by allowing Democrats to portray him as "insensitive and downright cruel."

But as for the June Republican primary, "don't count him out. The kid's got a fanatical following," Thigpen said. "They're going to forgive him almost anything and stick to him like glue."

Similarly, Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon said Bauer's words "came out as condescending and insulting," but his overall message about government dependency and personal responsibility will appeal to his evangelical Republican base.

State GOP Chairwoman Karen Floyd, who is not taking sides in the race for the nomination, said the flap should be a lesson to everyone to "choose our words more carefully."

So, let's tick off the checklist: sociopathic, careless with his words in public, tends to blame others for his own mistakes, and a hypocrite to boot. Yep, typical Right Wing Republican, all right.

[Darth Wong]

They went after him on The Daily Show last night. It was pretty funny, but to be honest this guy is just spouting the standard right-wing line on poverty: "Fuck 'em, let 'em starve, it's the only way they'll learn."

Pretty much the entire Republican party and even much of the Democrat party basically agrees with this thinking. The only thing that distinguishes him is the choice of words he used to describe it.

[Vastatosaurus Rex]

Thought Mark Sanford was bad? Meet Adrian Bauer

S.C. politician's welfare remark called ‘immoral’
Candidate for governor likens government aid to feeding stray animals

updated 5:32 p.m. CT, Mon., Jan. 25, 2010

COLUMBIA, S.C. - When things looked their darkest for Gov. Mark Sanford — when he was in danger of being impeached for running off to Argentina to see his mistress — his best insurance policy may well have been South Carolina's lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer.

Lawmakers knew if they removed Sanford, they would end up with Bauer, a fiercely ambitious Republican with a reputation for reckless and immature behavior.

Now Bauer has folks shaking their heads again, after he likened government assistance to the poor to feeding stray animals.

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

So, let's tick off the checklist: sociopathic, careless with his words in public, tends to blame others for his own mistakes, and a hypocrite to boot.

Not only is he sociopathic, he sounds like a eugenicist by complaining that poor people breed too much.

[Darth Wong]

Not only is he sociopathic, he sounds like a eugenicist by complaining that poor people breed too much.

Wake up and smell the reality: poor people do breed too much. That's a global trend, not just a local one. Wealth and education are generally inversely correlated to birth rate.

The problem is that he's one of those imbecile Republicans who thinks that the way to address this problem is to tell poor people not to use birth control or condoms, and then to starve their kids by gutting welfare systems. That's just deranged.

[loomer]

I miss the days when you could be a eugenicist without it being some kind of dirty word thanks to its association with the nazis and shitheads like this.

Honestly, he's right. The poor do breed too much, but cutting welfare won't solve a damn thing. The root of the problem needs addressing, and that's... Boom, shithouse education and religion, as usual.

[Bakustra]

I miss the days when you could be a eugenicist without it being some kind of dirty word thanks to its association with the nazis and shitheads like this.

Honestly, he's right. The poor do breed too much, but cutting welfare won't solve a damn thing. The root of the problem needs addressing, and that's... Boom, shithouse education and religion, as usual.

Eugenics from the start was associated with the idea of purifying humanity by removing "undesirables" from breeding, because it was thought that poverty was genetic, so you could eliminate poverty by killing off the poor/sterilizing them, in the case of economic eugenics. However, "undesirables" always included racial minorities, epileptics, diabetics, and anyone that society disliked. Modern population control is based around alleviating poverty, rather than eliminating it, by convincing people to have fewer children. The two aren't really that similar.

[Samuel]

I think loomer was refering to using genetic engineering to improve humanity. Although I should note that epilipsy and diabeties do have a genetic component and are handicaps- we just found a technological solution for both of them.

[Bakustra]

I think loomer was refering to using genetic engineering to improve humanity. Although I should note that epilipsy and diabeties do have a genetic component and are handicaps- we just found a technological solution for both of them.

Eugenics isn't genetic engineering. Genetic engineering wouldn't eliminate poverty, which is what Loomer was talking about. Both are genetic disorders, but the point is that eugenics isn't and wasn't a compassionate attempt to eliminate poverty, it was an attempt to murder/sterilize the undesirables of society. Those two disorders were some of the more common targets.

[Simon_Jester]

I miss the days when you could be a eugenicist without it being some kind of dirty word thanks to its association with the nazis and shitheads like this.

Honestly, he's right. The poor do breed too much, but cutting welfare won't solve a damn thing. The root of the problem needs addressing, and that's... Boom, shithouse education and religion, as usual.

Eugenics dates back to a time when people didn't know the mechanism of heredity and had no ability to tell the difference between a genetic trait in your nature and a trait you learned from your parents or the society around you. Generally, eugenicists didn't even realize they needed to be able to tell the difference. So they were stupid enough to believe that if poor people were stealing a lot it was because they had inherited genes for criminal tendencies from their ancestors, and that if they were uneducated, gullible, and ignorant it was because they had inherited genes for stupidity from their ancestors. And they compounded their stupidity by being cruel to helpless people, often including children and mental patients.

From a scientific standpoint, eugenics as practiced by real people bears the same relation to genetics that astrology bears to astronomy. And if that isn't bad enough for you, it adds the vice of killing or sterilizing people on the basis of the bullshit predictions of a bullshit people.

Eugenics was always a dirty word; it's just that people didn't realize how filthy the concept was until they saw what happened when people carried it to its logical extremes.

[Count Chocula]

I heard this sound bite on the way home last night, and couldn't help but wince at it. Bauer's comment is especially odious because, in South Carolina, a large percentage of welfare recipients (at least the most visible ones in the urban areas) are black. It's really really easy to read what he said and think "that cracker just said we animal darkies breed too much! Too bad for his pasty ass we can vote too!" Comparing welfare recipients to animals is waayyy beyond the pale, and if Bauer really does talk faster than he can frame his thoughts, I'm guessing we actually heard what he really thinks.

Hey, at least he wasn't standing in front of a locked school with the National Guard for backup, right? There's a silver lining for you.

If the voters of South Carolina have any sense, this guy's race for governor just ended.

[Count Chocula]

On the eugenics sidetrack: you can add the U.S. of A.'s Margaret Sanger to the eugenics hall of shame. She was the founder of (what became) Planned Parenthood. Birth control was seen by her as a key part of a eugenics program to "Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring" (from her book, A Plan for Peace). Blacks were high on her list for culling.

[Bounty]

I miss the days when you could be a eugenicist without it being some kind of dirty word thanks to its association with the nazis and shitheads like this.

Amazing. You're likely born in the nineties but you 'miss' the days before 1933?

[Crossroads Inc.]

They went after him on The Daily Show last night. It was pretty funny, but to be honest this guy is just spouting the standard right-wing line on poverty: "Fuck 'em, let 'em starve, it's the only way they'll learn."

Pretty much the entire Republican party and even much of the Democrat party basically agrees with this thinking. The only thing that distinguishes him is the choice of words he used to describe it.

My dad has been saying this for years and I have come to see it as basically the guiding principle of the Republican party. Things like Welfare, public schools, Government Healthcare, anything that HELPS the public but is PAID for by the government basically enrages them. On the surface they scream about "Scoialism" or "Big Government" but in truth the reason they hate these things is that they run against everything they deep down believe.

Again comments like this one are nothing but par for the course for Most Conservatives, and he just made the mistake of actually saying it in public instead of behind closed doors.

Indeed much of Republican involvement in government is precisely to make it as UNhelpful as possible. Run up massive spending while at the same time slashing all income and taxes, the whole "starve the beast" mentality. The very idea that, run properly, Government can HELP the nation disgusts them...

I always peg conservatives on this and, no mater what they may say at first, talk to them long enough and you can get them to basically admit to some version of:
"Iv'e got mine, Fuck everyone else"

[Vastatosaurus Rex]

Indeed much of Republican involvement in government is precisely to make it as UNhelpful as possible. Run up massive spending while at the same time slashing all income and taxes, the whole "starve the beast" mentality. The very idea that, run properly, Government can HELP the nation disgusts them...

No, they do want government to be helpful---but only to the rich and powerful. That's why they don't mind cutting rich people's taxes or invading nations to be exploited by Western corporations.