Pro-Drug Test Lt. Gov.: Helping Poor Like Feeding Stray Animals

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Photo: Playahata
Fox News is gonna love this guy.

​South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, as part of an argument that people should lose government benefits if they fail drug tests, drew a comparison between government help for poor people and “feeding stray animals” — who, he added, “breed.”

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said during a town hall meeting, reports Brian Montopoli at CBS News. “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’e think much further than that,” Lt. Gov. Bauer continued. “And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

More than half the students in South Carolina participate in a program allowing them to get their lunch free, or at a reduced cost.
Bauer later went into damage-control spin mode, claiming he wasn’t saying those who receive government help “were animals or anything else.”
Bauer had made the original comment as part of an argument that people should lose government benefits if they fail drug tests or don’t attend parent-teacher conferences or PTA meetings.
“Look folks, if you receive goods or services from the government and you don’t attend a parent-teacher conference, bam, you lose your benefits,” he said.
The Greenville News, in a follow-up story, reported that Bauer later claimed “he would penalize only adults and that he never advocated taking away a child’s free or reduced-price lunch.”
Bauer claimed his speech was “about breaking the cycle of dependence on government aid.”
During the town hall meeting, Bauer said he “can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina.”
“So how do you fix it?” he asked. “Well, you say, ‘Look, if you receive goods or services from the government, then you owe something back.”
South Carolina Democrats reacted angrily to Bauer’s comments, with some calling for Bauer to apologize and to drop his gubernatorial bid (he hopes to succeed disgraced fellow Republican and international womanizer Gov. Mark Sanford).
Some in Bauer’s own party were also critical of the comments, with Republican state Rep. Harry Cato saying Bauer “has gone overboard.”

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