[Will Rush Limbaugh let hungry children dumpster dive at his Florida beach front home (source: Google Maps)]

I know, it’s not news: this mother is furious with Rush Limbaugh. What’s news, though, is that he’s managed to ratchet up both his ignorance and self-centeredness to a point beyond any reach of human capacity, by suggesting that 16 million impoverished hungry American children rummage in dumpsters for food this summer, in the absence of federally-funded free lunch programs.

Seriously, how stupid and malignant can any one person get before they are no longer fit to be called human?

And how maliciously laissez-faire does one have to be before they get their goddamned microphone taken from them?

I live in a community that Republicans love; it votes for their kind about 75% of the time, is aggressive with community zoning policies, has a solid school system. Property values here have been fairly stable in comparison to other parts of the state or even the neighboring city. In spite of this apparent economic stability, about 35% of the kids in our school district qualified for free lunch BEFORE the economic downturn in 2008.

Why so many in a well-to-do community? I ask my school-aged kids for observations and feedback; they said many of the qualifying kids they know of are members of a single-parent household, where the custodial parent is working at a job which pays wages below poverty level, or households where one parent is unable to find work. That’s virtually every retail service job in the community, from grocery stores to food service, even many desk jobs. They simply don’t pay enough to support a single person let alone a family, assuming one can even get a full-time job in those fields. Even two parents working these kinds of jobs may not make enough to meet poverty level, especially if there’s more than one child in the house.

And yet the store fronts are gleaming and shiny-clean, thanks to the local community’s codes. They nicely mask the poverty lurking within — truly a Potemkin village.

Factor in more than a decade of wage stagnation, the continuing double-digit increases in health care costs which factor into as many as 65% of all bankruptcies, losses to any savings due to the economic downturn and the number of hungry children have only increased, not decreased.

There certainly are situations where parents aren’t fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure kids have food – but their children often qualify for free lunch anyhow. Crushing and persistent poverty isn’t likely to help any parent’s skills, and innocent children shouldn’t suffer for these deficiencies. How these children will make it through the summer and be adequately prepared for school this fall is truly puzzling.

And Rush Limbaugh is blind to all of this. He lives in a world where poverty never injects its ugly head; he’s further removed himself from the chance that reality will pop his bubble by choosing not to be a parent, remaining in his boy-man world surrounded by toys and sheltered by the illusions that yet another fresh trophy wife and an overcompensated job in a tiny booth decorated a la "Dictator Style" away from other humans affords him, easing his minor discomforts with medications and sex tourism. The grounds around his personal palace are carefully groomed, the doors closed tightly to the intrusion of the real world that most Americans live in, and he can safely rant all he wants about “the others” who do not live as he does because of the First Amendment protections he has purchased for him by deep-pocketed and non-human corporate sponsors.

For some twisted reason, this pompous, fleshy, sheltered windbag is allowed to pontificate to the American public over their own publicly-owned airwaves, persuading them that hungry children are simply too lazy to go to the nearest refrigerator to get food, or unmotivated to dive into a dumpster for their next meal. If anybody exemplifies a lack of motivation, it’s Limbaugh, who cannot be bothered to do any research into a subject before bloviating about it, who appears incapable of reflecting upon his words which advocate behavior belonging to a third world country.

I am reminded of history at this point. Upon being told that starving commoners were rioting for bread, it’s alleged that Marie-Antoinette of France replied, “Let them eat cake.” It’s not clear she lived long enough to regret any such rumored ignorant and ignoble comment; the temptation to make any such comments was eliminated for her.

How fortunate for Limbaugh that he’s not a queen of this troubled country and merely an overpaid, ignorant and obnoxious corporate-funded leech shilling to a weakened democracy.

Related Must-Read:  What if there is no kitchen? (a take on this story, as seen through a child who needed free lunch)