When it comes to explaining things, no one has been as inept recently as South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer.

Most of us understand what dependency is and how it develops. But Bauer really put his foot in it last Friday when he attempted to explain dependency by comparing poor children to stray animals:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed.”

You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.

. . .

I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina. You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks. It’s there, period.

Sheesh! Talk about maladroit! Along with, apparently, acute memory loss. The Washington Post reported yesterday that as a child Bauer himself was a beneficiary of subsidized school lunches. Hmm.

Generous hearts compel us to feed the hungry without expectation of reward or payback. But the likely payback with subsidized school lunches is more attentive children, better learning, and a better future for the kids, their communities, and the nation (let’s not use Bauer as an example).

Bauer is a fool. And he’s lieutenant governor to another fool, Gov. Mark Sanford, the genius who went hiking on the Appalachian Trail and ended up in Rio with his mistress. Now we know why they didn’t kick Sanford out of office.

The lesson is not “don’t feed the children.” The lesson is “be careful who you vote for.”