These parents are criminally negligent, according to Kate O’Beirne — a National Review editor who made these remarks at a Republican strategy session last week — because they don’t know how to give their children a bowl of cereal and a banana:
“My question is what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana?” O’Beirne asked. “I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect.”
She continued, “If that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than — that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally … criminally negligent with respect to raising children.”
Apparently, O’Beirne does not realize that the parents to whom she refers have very low incomes (or no income) and actually don’t have the money to keep supplies of cereal and bananas in their homes — those who have homes. It’s not that they don’t know how to pour cereal into a bowl or are physically incapable of handling the unpeeling of bananas. There actually are millions of parents in the United States who cannot consistently afford to buy basic food items. Perhaps this reality is beyond O’Beirne’s ken because she grew up in Manhasset, on the North Shore of Long Island, where the average household income is almost $200,000 a year and the average home is valued at just under $670,000.
You can see and hear O’Beirne wondering why all these low- or no-income parents cannot figure out how to “rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana” at Crooks and Liars.
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