Compassionate Conservawhat? I Couldn't Hear You Over My Growling Belly.

As conservatives across America continue to lick the wounds from their Nov. 4 drubbing and contemplate the why of it all, trying to figure out whether they should go more left or more right, I submit the following for their consideration (emphasis mine):

Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007 [up 50% from 2006], while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

…Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn't have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.

Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food supply at some point and classifies them as having "very low food security." Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was described as having "food insecurity with hunger."

People in the wealthiest country in the world going hungry, and the Republicans' solution to the hunger problem was taking the word hunger out of the description in the USDA's annual food access report. And these people have to wonder why they got voted out of office?

[Fun with the Wayback Machine: I go off on one about the removal of the word "hunger" from the USDA report, on November 16, 2006, days after the Republicans had merely lost their Congressional majority. Hint hint. Some people never learn.]