Rep Adam Schiff (D - Hollywood) would like to take some time from pushing discredited conspiracy theories against President Trump to sneer at a man who, unlike him, worked his way up from nothing.
Schiff chided Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson for saying that poverty is a "state of mind."
"If poverty is a 'state of mind' Doctor Carson, then how would you diagnose hunger, homelessness and addiction - mere hallucinations?" Schiff said in a tweet.
Carson, a former neurosurgeon, made the comment in a radio interview on SiriusXM earlier in the day.
"I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind," he said, according to the Associated Press. "You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they'll be right back up there."
Adam Schiff's father was a regional sales director. He represents, among other areas, Hollywood. Of the two men, I rather suspect Ben Carson knows far more about poverty.
Carson said that after his parents divorced, his mother, his brother, and he moved from Detroit to Boston to "live with relatives in tenements."
"There was pretty horrendous violence ... gangs, broken glass, and boarded up windows and doors, murders — I had two cousins who were killed," he said. "I remember as a 9-year-old kid, sitting on the ghetto stairs, looking to the building across the street, out of which all the windows had been broken. And there was a sunbeam shining through, and it made me think about my future. And I remember thinking I probably won't make it to 25."
Adam Schiff once remembers getting a hangnail and worrying he wouldn't make it to his dance recital.