The question I pose is not a joke; Conservatives obviously don’t understand the things they read or hear. In a talk on Women and the Economy at Rhode Island College in Providence, President Obama made these statements among others:
“Sometimes, someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. And that’s not a choice we want Americans to make.
… we need family leave, we need better child care policies, and we need to make sure that women get an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. “
Now, for people who graduated from high school, this is a pretty straight forward statement, for Conservatives, not so much. The only sentences they heard were the first two. They seem to have tremendous difficulty in the area of comprehension. Here are some of the Right Wing headlines resulting from those two sentences (I’m not going to link to any of them for the same reason I don’t listen to chimps screaming):
Obama Insults Stay-at-Home Moms
Watch as Obama Slams The Choices of Stay-at-Home Moms
Ouch: Obama Claims America Doesn’t Want Stay-At-Home-Moms
Obama: We Don’t Want Stay-At-Home Mothers
President Obama Plays the Shame Card on Stay-At-Home-Moms
Obama Loses Stay-at-Home Moms’ Support (If He Ever Had It)
– This writer not only totally missed the President’s point entirely, she rattled off a laundry list of talking points (no pun intended) straight out of the Venker handbook, which of course culminated in yammering about feminists. Pop a Zoloft lady, Sheesh!
Now there are only two possibilities here: Either these folks purposely took the President’s statements out of context, which we know they’d never do, or they’re simply illiterate. My money’s on the latter.