On a roll

Howard Kurtzhas had two great columns yesterday and today. The first about the media hypocrisy in being interested in the poor only when they can use them as a club to attack Bush.

Covering the 37 million people who live below the poverty line--the percentage has increased for four straight years--is not as easy as, say, covering advocates who claim to speak on their behalf. Many of the poor are wary of intrusive journalists, don't carry cell phones and don't speak in snappy sound bites.

I'm not sure that anybody really "lives below the poverty line," unless they're drug addicts, mentally ill or are being abused by someone withholding assistance the assistance we give to practically anybody. Nobody in this country really has to go hungry, or homeless. A lot of them have become helpless through our societies attitude that nothing is anyone's fault.

The same goes for race: It is far easier to write about the politics of race--President Bush appointing the first two black secretaries of state, or refusing to speak to the NAACP--than to probe the impact of federal policies on the lives of minorities. And the problems of generations of low-income broken families who seem unable to escape the cycle of poverty can be depressing fare.

And it tends to discredit the liberals' solutions to poverty and their claims to care about these people. George Bush shows more concern for the victims of our welfare and education systems, by trying to lift them out of their lives of dependence and fecklessness, and not just sending them more checks.

I've heard about a woman who used the temporary assistance she received to buy and $80 purse, but who can blame her, when she's probably never had that much cash in her life. She is the product of a system that has never taught her the true value of anything.