Conservatives have no new ideas, yet keep accusing Liberals of same

[CatWoman]

Liberals go nowhere with same old deal

By Jim Wooten | Saturday, December 2, 2006, 11:42 AM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About noon on Monday, a school day, about 15 teenagers - none, presumably, old enough to buy liquor — sat around an apartment complex drinking and “thinking about” a 14-year-old shot to death by a pizza delivery driver who was being robbed.

Either scene — the small business from which the pizza was dispatched or the one where the shooting occurred — speaks volumes about the pathologies that afflict communities, pathologies that incubate poverty and destroy neighborhoods.

Reporter Ernie Suggs describes the small business, Super Crown Pizza in southwest Atlanta: “Bars are on all of the windows and doors … cashiers and cooks work behind bulletproof glass. Counterfeit bills are taped to the wall, along with a long list of people not to deliver to, who have obviously cheated Super Crown in the past.”

The 44-year-old delivery man, a Pakistani immigrant working two jobs to support his two daughters, has been robbed and beaten at least twice. Delivering to an apartment complex late at night, he told police he was approached and robbed by a group of “three or four” people. During the confrontation, he shot and killed one of the alleged assailants, the 14-year-old.

Flash back now to an appeal three prominent Democrats made in the days leading up to November’s general election.

“On November 7th,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), “we face the most dangerous situation we ever have. If you think fighting off dogs and water hoses in the ’60s was bad, imagine if we sit idly by and let the right-wing Republicans take control of the Fulton County Commission.”

“The efforts” of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others “will be lost,” warned Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

“Unless you want them to turn back the clock on equal rights and human rights and economic opportunity for all of us,” elect the Democrat, said former Ambassador Andy Young. Concluded Lewis: “Your very life may depend on it.”

Step back and reconcile the facts on the ground with the rhetoric on the air.

Lewis, whose rhetoric was most incendiary, clung to his contention that “there are radical branches of the Republican Party who want to take us back,” as he wrote in an op-ed just after the election. He continued: “They want to undo the New Deal and Great Society programs … These neoconservatives make no secret of their desires to turn back the clock. And for many voters, especially minorities, that would represent a state of emergency.”

The various slurs can be disregarded, for it is abundantly clear that to some deeply partisan liberals, any conservative or Republican to the right of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is “right-wing.” The question does arise, though, as to how the Republican threat the three prominent Democrats envision relates to the needs of the besieged business and the culture of crime along Campbellton Road.

The problem with liberalism is that its New Deal-Great Society programs are spent. Some have been tried — in a dozen, or a score, or 50 iterations and designs — and none changes the facts on the ground, either in the apartment complex or for the pizza store.

Nobody’s going hungry in that neighborhood because food or help’s not accessible. Nobody’s unsheltered or cold, as poor farmers, tenants and urban slum-dwellers were half a century ago. Nobody’s income status blocks their access to medical care. Schools and textbooks and education options are universally available.

And yet a company like Crider Poultry in Stillmore, the object of considerable press attention because of the large number of illegals it employed, is hiring felons bused in daily from a Macon diversion center 96 miles away. Half the free-world applicants since the illegals left don’t pass drug tests or reference checks, and of those who do, many have poor attendance or quit quickly, said Crider’s president, David Purtle. “Our challenge is — in hiring unskilled people — their ability to understand what’s expected of them,” Purtle said. “Attendance is important. No acting up, no mouthing off. They just haven’t learned.”

New Deal? Great Society? Both addressed worlds that existed generations ago. That Big Government Democrats cling to them, while governing the world that exists at both ends of the pizza delivery man’s journey into the dangerous night, is a measure of how dated their solutions have become.

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