Oh Newt.. the gift that keeps on giving

"Hey, poor kid!  Clean your own damn school toilets!"

So I'm sneezing out my sinuses and coughing up my lungs tonight, so for shits and giggles I made my way to CNN. 

I came across this gem: 

Newt calls child labor laws "truly stupid."

If you read the whole article, you'll see that Newt believes poor children under the age of 16 in poor neighborhoods should be helping clean their schools.  Get rid of the janitors (and their unions, of course) and put kids in situations dealing with nasty chemicals and fishing whatever kids flush down the toilet. 

Now, I can't claim to be a genius, but this is pretty stupid. 

A couple reasons:

1.  The janitors working in those poor neighborhood have families to feed, too.  You would put them out of work so a child can learn the great skill of scrubbing toilets?

2.  Rather than improving schools in poor neighborhoods, or helping kids with athletics/educational after-school activities, you would rather show them the importance of never rising above the life of a janitor. 

3.  Child labor laws have existed so that children could not be used by anyone to do labor that would put the children in danger, or work when they should be learning.  

I think I understand it now.  Republicans want to drag down any progressive movement in society and take us back to a Golden Age where capitalism ran amok, and children were hired to be "grease monkeys," who would crawl into tight spaces in big machinery to fix the machines (and sadly, many children died in those machines). 

That's right.  Newt wants us to go back to the Industrial Revolution. 

I am starting to wonder if the Republicans are just trolling the American people.  They have to be.  No one could be this stupid.

Oh, wait.  According to my brother (whose blog is www.brettcottrell.blogspot.com by the way), they are. 

Gus