For the Thanksgiving Family Forum, all the GOP candidates except for Mormon Messrs. Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney gathered at a megachurch in Iowa to discuss issues of concern to religious voters. These didn’t include, as one would be forgiven for suspecting, Christ’s injunction that the rich give all their money in charity to the poor, or the apostles’ establishment of a society wherein, “all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44-45) They did include, however, this week’s frontrunner Newt Gingrich’s defense of the bathrooms of lower Manhattan from the use of Wall Street occupiers, wherein the former House Speaker took exception to the protesters’ alleged tendency “to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for.”
Previously, the hue and cry from the right wing about the occupiers’ urinary patterns was to do with alleged outdoor self-relief, which they said depreciated the quality of life in Manhattan’s financial district. The pervasive scent of waste in New York’s impoverished neighborhoods had never so exorcised the right wing – which apparently views only one class as entitled to clean sidewalks and doorsteps. In fact, the hemming and hawing about public cleanliness has always essentially been pandering at the behest of the 1 percent, as revealed by Gingrich’s insistence on damning the occupation if it does and damning it if it doesn’t.