Adam Smith, whom some consider to be the father of capitalism, thought it fair, right and proper that the wealthy should pay proportionately more in taxes than the less wealthy. By Sarah's dim light however, the father of Capitalism would be a socialist. In the crepuscular gloom of her perky little mind, any kind of tax is socialism: It's spreading the wealth around.
Handing out government checks as a stimulus isn't socialism, but to reduce taxes is the same as to increase taxes because it is socialism if it's taxes. Ok, so you're not from a small town and probably not a real American, so to make it perfectly clear, Obama's proposed tax cut for 95% of Americans is:
"the philosophy of government taking more, which is a misuse of the power to tax."Got that? Less is more and more is less and together it's socialism. Spreading $600 checks around isn't socialism, because it's just giving (real) people back the money wealthier people paid in, but lowering taxes on nearly everybody is socialism because not only is it spreading money around, but a "massive tax increase."
"It leads to government moving into the role of taking care of you, and government and politicians and, kind of moving in as the other half of your family to make decisions for you."It's really impossible to make any sense of this gibberish, other than to infer from it that she's opposed to funding anything the government does, opposed to having the government do anything but pay for her husband's basketball tickets and her feloniously padded expense account - opposed to government itself.
Who knows if it makes sense to her or to her audience or whether either of them care? It's a hate session. It would be less effective if it made sense. It's the kind of mockery that used to precede pogroms and purges and witch hunts and various slaughters of various innocents in the more primitive dream world Mad Sarah looks backward to as a guide. As pure chant-and-response shamanism, it seems to be as effective at eliciting shrill cries of "kill him" and "socialism" from the howling jackals as it is at scaring hell out of anyone rational. Indeed is anyone rational not terrified of allowing this simple minded sociopath anywhere near Washington?
Frankly, I find the whole idiotic campaign amusing. Palin was just the comical cherry on top of a well staged campaign designed to elicit predictable, emotional responses from both sides. Voters, people in the US have become so mind numbingly ignorant as to make the believers and supporters of the Salem witch trials appear to be thoughtful and rational.
ReplyDeleteI am so absolutely glad that I moved out of that god fosaken country and can view this from afar, relatively unaffected.
Obama will win and that will be good, but you are all going to go through this same ridiculous, lying charade again in 4 years and probably in every election to come. Good f^^king luck.
Actually I think it will continue right through Obama's first term. The Republicreeps were declaring the failure of the Clinton Presidency ( with straight faces) weeks before he entered the White House. They won't be as kind to Obama.
ReplyDeleteThere will be fake scandals and rumors of scandals. . .
For weeks now, what has been increasingly unsettling to me about Palin (& increasing talk about her being the front runner in 4 years) is the fact that she is a new brand of idiotic republican rhetoric. Campaign after campaign we have become used the simplistic way in which republicans WILLFULLY try to reframe issues - all the while KNOWINGLY ducking the truth. In other words - we usually (not always) have been confronted by republicans who are disingenuous. Smart people who KNOW that they are twisting the facts into emotionally charged rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteWith Palin - and perhaps this is what her appeal is to the extreme right - she does NOT seem to KNOW that she is not being truthful. I've listened to her, watched her - looking for a sign that she is being disingenuous. AND - quite often I sense no sign of this. Very scarily I find myself thinking - she REALLY believes!!! what she is saying. She is not just playing politician. She is playing at being one of the CHOSEN with real insight (Ya know - like knowing the truth about the russians poised to invade Alaska).
And isn't this what is so galling about McCain? Because we KNOW that he KNOWS better?
But Palin? Shades of Rick Santorum. Oh how scary.
Fogg – you may be right; the early Clinton years wuz a hoot, wuzzent they! They wouldn’t leave the poor man alone for ten seconds at a stretch without calling for some Judge Bean special prosecutor to determine if the Honorable William Jefferson had been guilty of impure thoughts or wicked deeds. But my hope is that the loss suffered by these dumb-effs will be so catastrophic that they will just shut up for a while, realizing how much damage they’ve already done themselves. Wouldn’t count on it, though—they really are quite stupid, and apt to keep making things worse. Already, no doubt, The Base and its high-powered assistants are saying that McCain lost because he didn’t run a sleazy enough or wingnut-friendly enough campaign. Yes, they needed to accuse Obama of holding Satanic black masses with Bill Ayers and the Ghost of Stalin in the basement of Jeremiah Wright’s church. I like your comments about Adam Smith—he was okay by this ancient big lizard. Those Scottish Enlightenment lads had much going for them, and latter-day market zealots conveniently forget that Smith was a proponent of capitalism as a system that could help ordinary people live better than the old royalits/mercantilist system allowed. Sarah, by contrast, is sort of like the freshman dummy at a state college who writes her composition research paper on how we should abolish public education.
ReplyDeleteSquid – yes, shades of Santorum, but no doubt better color coordination. I mean, the GOP had better be getting some value-added for that $150,000! Palin is that most classical of creatures, the downright demagogue. I notice that more and more she must be realizing that she appeals only to the lowest of the low within the Republican Party, so she’s giving the effort to fire them up every ounce of energy she’s got. Yesterday she conjured up a commie-pinko dystopia if Commissar Barack manages to get himself elected. Yep, we’ll all have to pay one final 100% tax rate and then go out into the fields to harvest the rice, sort of like in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. But the strategy is disastrous – it is alienating all but the approximately 20%-30% of the country that really is insane.
Expat, I’ll agree with anyone that our know-nothing, bully-in-chief leader has constituted a threat to the planet. But we aren’t all Jesus freaks, gun nuts, neo-fascist warmongers, racist hillbillies, and zombie homophobes to be lumped together conveniently as “Voters, people in the US”; neither is it salutary to suggest that all dissent from, say, Sarah Palin’s crazy politics is a “predictable, emotional response” elicited by the puppetmasters of the far right. If that is the case, the situation is quite hopeless, and we might as well start handing out the black uniforms and red armbands. I sometimes write in a satirical vein, but deep down I’m not at all amused about the current state of affairs. America’s mistakes have an odd way of causing problems all around the world. We need to get this one right. As I’ve said before, the difference between civilization and near-barbarism seems to be about, oh, 5% of the voting public one way or the other. About half of us are modern, reasonable folk, and the other half or so may fit into one or more of the categories mentioned above, or may be so apathetic and uninformed that we fall right into the bad guys’ hands. I suspect the percentages are uncomfortably close to that in lots of other places in the world, too, much as I pride myself in being a Good European, at least in spirit. Now if we can drive the gap to 10%, surely “sheep will gambol on the plain fully roasted,” rivers will run with fair-trade organic coffee (cream and Canadian Natural Rush honey, please), and salads will toss themselves as the miniature tomatoes dance around the dish with glee.
Dino - I personally chase my little tomatoes around a sea of arugula sprinkled with feta.
ReplyDeleteElitism by salad! Iceberg being for SP's ignorant masses.
(tempted as I am to say something oh so clever about icebergs off the Alaskan coast . . . I will refrain)
There is a related article by Kathy G who asks: Are today's wingnuts getting wingnuttier? The comment threads accompanying the article are also read-worthy.
ReplyDeleteRight now, I am trying to temper my own cynicism and avoid predictions of how the wingnuttery might try to sabotage an Obama presidency. According to Kathy G and many of her readers, wingnuts have always been around, and they won’t go away anytime soon. But I tend to doubt this will translate into a Palin candidacy in four years.
Let us not ignore the recent defections from the Republican Party: Colin Powell, CC Goldwater (granddaughter of “Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater), Christopher Buckley (son of William F.), Ken Adelman (neo-con hawk who served under Ford, Reagan, and Bush), Nicholas Burns (former Under-Secretary of State in the Bush-Cheney administration), Scott McClellan, William Weld (former Republican governor of Massachusetts), Barbara Lorman (Wisconsin GOP official), Charles Fried (former General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign), among others not listed here. Reasons for these defection? Doubts about Palin in specific and McCain's judgement overall.
Peggy Noonan (Ronald Reagan’s former speech writer) said in the WSJ:
"In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism."
There is talk about post-election recriminations within the Republican Party: Republican fears of historic Obama landslide unleash civil war for the future of the party.
Perhaps an Obama victory may signal a paradigm shift in American politics that will replace the Reagan revolution. It will be interesting to hear Obama’s inaugural speech in January and subsequent reactions.
Maybe the wingnuts don't know it, but moderate and thoughtful conservatives know that their political fortunes are diminished when they stray too far from the center where elections are won. I doubt they will want to repeat this mistake again.
Squid,
ReplyDeleteArugula. Oh, I knew it -- a Marxist! A downright Marxist!
Octo,
Excellent thoughts there. The most extreme faction in the GOP probably lacks any capacity for self-regulation; the adults in the party, however, are not in that case, and they fear that a tidal wave is about to sweep over them. They are going to have to find some higher, more defensible ground. They're in a bad way because they have abandoned their traditional philosophy, and by now the Democrats have co-opted some of its appeal: defense of individual rights, the notion that government should serve the people and not the other way around, etc. If Obama does a good job and retains much of his popularity, the Republicans will have to rebuild themselves almost from the ground up unless they want to be the "me too" party.
I quoted Peggy Noonan in my blog this morning but didn't think it was good enough for Swash Zone standards.
ReplyDeleteGlad you picked up on it. If anyone knows about vulgarizing a campaign it's Noonan.
The desperation is rising like a new moon tide with an East wind behind it. The latest bit is that all those donations pouring in are because Obama has rigged the credit card software to let "ferriners" send money from Waziristan.
Pathetic.
Anything but admit the country is disgusted with them, with her and with the Party they rode in on.
Fogg,
ReplyDeleteAh yes, Obama's prodigious money-raising o'er the Net. If anybody is getting credit-card donations from Waziristan, it would be McCain--hasn't Al Qaeda all but endorsed him as their preferred opponent because they think he will fall right into every trap they set? The wingers just can't stand, as you say, the realization that lots of "little people" are voting with their credit cards against JMAC and Say-ruh.
Standards, Fogg? I recommend loose morals as a survival strategy against wingnuts. They should consider themselves not just mooned, but "blue" mooned.
ReplyDelete