When Ala. State Senator Bryan Taylor, R-Prattville, introduced a bill requiring welfare recipients to perform community service to receive their benefits, he didn’t realize he was propelling himself into the pantheon of the world’s worst people.
But according to the Lauderdale County Democratic Party, that’s exactly what he did.
The tweet by the Lauderdale Democrats linked to an article by Montgomery Advertiser liberal editorial writer Josh Moon. In the article, Moon bemoans “ultra conservatives” in the Alabama Republican Party who perpetuate “every misperception, every caricature, every false narrative” of the poor in our state.
Moon specifically takes exception to Taylor’s bill, which was one of several welfare reform bills that began working their way through the Alabama legislature last week. The other bills allow drug testing of welfare recipients with a prior drug conviction; make it a crime to defraud public assistance programs; prohibit welfare recipients from spending benefits on alcohol, tobacco, strippers and gambling; and require welfare applicants to prove they’re trying to get a job.
Moon shreds the GOP for those policies, which he says aren’t based in reality, but rather fit into a false Republican narrative “that most welfare recipients are deadbeats.” He did, however, stop short of calling Alabama Republicans the worst people in the world.
That’s where the Lauderdale Democratic Party came in.
While we’re thinking about it, let’s take a quick look at a randomly ordered, off-the-cuff list of some of the worst people in the world.
• North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un imprisons tens of thousands of his political enemies in labor camps and recently sentenced his uncle to be eaten by a pack of 120 dogs. In his spare time, Kim threatens the world with “all out nuclear war.”
• Joseph Kony is the leader of a guerrilla army that has abducted tens of thousands of children to become sex slaves and child soldiers. When there aren’t people around to kill, Kony’s army slaughters elephants so he can add more ivory tusks to his collection.
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the radical islamist who was the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks that killed roughly 3,000 Americans. He is currently being detained at Guantanamo Bay.
• Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, has led “a campaign of murder, rape and mass deportation” in Darfur. According to The Guardian, Bashir, “masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part” three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity. In case I’m not getting the point across, we’re talking genocide here.
…And now, the Lauderdale County Democrats would like to add Sen. Bryan Taylor and his fellow Republicans in the Alabama legislature to this list.
Taylor took a short break from his evil deeds to give us his thoughts on being one of the worst people on Earth.
“I guess that shows just how far left some Alabama Democrats have swung,” Taylor told Yellowhammer. “I’m just proposing to reinstate the bipartisan program a Republican Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 as part of welfare reform. It was in effect until 2008, when Obama suspended it. Since then, the number of food stamp recipients has skyrocketed by 56 percent. If it makes me ‘evil’ to support reinstating a bipartisan program to require that unemployed able-bodied adults without dependents engage in productive activity, such as job-hunting, job training, or community service in order to keep their benefits, well, then, I guess I’m evil.”
A call to Lauderdale Democratic Party Chairman John C. Harris, Jr. was not immediately returned.
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
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