The people in the Obama administration want Americans to just do away with their pride and get on the government dole. They can’t stand the idea that many Americans are proud, hard working individuals who refuse to accept government handouts, even during hard times. So they’re trying to change who we are.

The Department of Agriculture went as far as to give out an award to a local agency for overcoming “mountain pride” and increasing the number of people on food stamps. In his recent column, Wesley Pruden likened this to ethnic cleansing. They may not be totally eliminating people they consider to be gun-toting, Bible-clinging hicks and rednecks, but they do want do away with what makes them who they are.

By “mountain pride,” they’re talking about the descendants of the Scots-Irish settlers who pushed the frontier from the Atlantic coast into the hills and mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama and the Carolinas, and later into the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas. These are the Americans that Jim Webb, the Democratic senator from Virginia and author of the much-acclaimed book, “Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” calls “poor but proud – and stubborn as hell.”

They arrived on the continent desperately poor, as described by the historian Vernon Louis Parrington. “So armed with axes, their seed potatoes and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic, thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the material out of which Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned, the creators of that western type which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type.”

Just the sort of material, you might say, to frustrate a community organizer with illusions of hauteur. Nevertheless, community organizers don’t quit easily. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, of the Agriculture Department gave “a Gold Award” recently to the local social workers in tiny Jefferson, N.C., between Husk and Deep Gap and not far from the Tennessee border, for bravely confronting “mountain pride” and increasing food-stamp participation in Ashe County by 10 percent.

But an increase of 10 percent isn’t good enough for the busy little bureaucrats.

SNAP has put out a brochure it calls a “toolkit,” which is shamelessly insensitive since a toolkit suggests “work,” and this goes athwart the pride of the dole which the feds are attempting to substitute for pride in the mountains. A section of the toolkit called “Common SNAP Myths” tells how important the feds think it is to reach people who have “beliefs” and subscribe to “myths” that make them reluctant to live on relief with charity from strangers.
“Millions of low-income people are not accessing the nutrition benefits for which they qualify,” the myth sheet explains. “To be effective, it is important that our national and local outreach counter myths . . . among those who . . . have beliefs that discourage them from enrolling.” Food stamps, argue the food-stamp pimps, help local business and create jobs by pumping money into the local economy. The dole a job creator? Who knew?

Read the whole thing. It’s all so creepy and disturbing. Increasing the number of people on food stamps, disability, unemployment and other forms of welfare is the Democrats’ idea of economic progress. Hopefully it won’t be too late to undo all of the damage they’ve done in November.