Quotes of the day about the Tea Party's attempts to cut spending on food stamps

Let's call it what it is: unabashed racism.

From a Daily Dish reader:

You can’t have a post about Republicans attempting to gut food stamps without including race in the conversation. To the Tea Party base, “food stamps” is code for “handouts to lazy black people,” and nothing gets the base more riled up than their hatred of any social program that helps “those people.” I think you’d agree that right now the right-wing GOP is much more motivated by placating and energizing its base than by any other factor. That’s what the votes to repeal Obamacare are about, and that’s what the food stamp votes are about. The simple fact is that the members of Congress who voted for the massive cut in food stamps did it so they could go back to their districts and tell the old, white, angry voters who elected them: “See, I’m in Washington, fighting the good fight to keep lazy, undeserving (*wink wink*) people from taking your hard-earned tax dollars.”

Another Daily Dish reader:

I really think that people outside the South have trouble understanding these sorts of things. It isn’t callous at all. It is entirely about race. It really is a long-standing race issue for many Southern whites, especially as you get closer and closer to the lower end of the middle class, but it can be found at most every strata. An example of the poisonous logic goes like this: “Food stamps are a handout to blacks who don’t want to work.” Now, you could point out the obvious, and say, “But needy white people get food stamps too,” but the response would be: “But that is different, and in any case, white people want to work so they aren’t the problem.” It is basically the same meme about welfare in general that has persisted for a generation.

Watch Congresswoman Jackie Speier respond to these proposed food stamps cuts: