8/26/11: As Ron Hillman recently pointed out, the Tea Party and its shills on the far right are in need of some basic reality checks:
I still believe that the Middle 80% politically (and most of the Bottom 99% economically) are decent, hard-working, honest and innovative people who are badly served by a tiny elite who have managed to dupe a minority who will be victims of their economic and political carnage into shilling for policies that will harm them deeply. This tiny elite, the top 1% who own a disproportionate amount of the wealth of this country but want even more, have their own news station and their own faux-populist party. They say stupid things because if they said out loud what they really advocate no one would support them. Closing down public schools and firing teachers to prevent a fraction of a percentage of Americans the inconvenience of having to visit a financial planner to avoid the estate tax just doesn't have the same ring as calling it a "death tax" and making distracting pseudo-philosophical statements such as, "Death should not be a taxable event." Allowing children, the disabled, and the poor to die of treatable conditions so that free-riders should not be bothered to do something they know they should do doesn't have much traction, but blathering on about whether healthcare is a privilege or a right and death panels that would be scary if they only existed seems to distract enough people to make support for healthcare reform, once wildly popular, now evenly split. Pulling stimulus spending and badly needed federal aid to states away at the worst possible time - an economic slow-down - would be viewed as economic suicide if it weren't for the misinformation campaign of the far right that tells the unemployed the reason they don't have a job is because of the "burden" of big government that must be slashed right now (while taxes should never be raised to Clinton- or Reagan-era levels because that would make the "job-creators" not in the mood to hire (not that they seem in all that much of a rush to hire now after 10 years of tax cuts)). I think the moronic statements on the age of the earth, the role of slavery in the first century of our country or the Civil War, or the non-role of Christianity in the founding of our secular government are all meant as a warm-up, loosening up the audience for the big whoppers about how tax cuts that have neither paid for themselves nor stimulated the economy for the past decade might start working if they were only deeper and longer.
I still believe that the Middle 80% politically (and most of the Bottom 99% economically) are decent, hard-working, honest and innovative people who are badly served by a tiny elite who have managed to dupe a minority who will be victims of their economic and political carnage into shilling for policies that will harm them deeply. This tiny elite, the top 1% who own a disproportionate amount of the wealth of this country but want even more, have their own news station and their own faux-populist party. They say stupid things because if they said out loud what they really advocate no one would support them. Closing down public schools and firing teachers to prevent a fraction of a percentage of Americans the inconvenience of having to visit a financial planner to avoid the estate tax just doesn't have the same ring as calling it a "death tax" and making distracting pseudo-philosophical statements such as, "Death should not be a taxable event." Allowing children, the disabled, and the poor to die of treatable conditions so that free-riders should not be bothered to do something they know they should do doesn't have much traction, but blathering on about whether healthcare is a privilege or a right and death panels that would be scary if they only existed seems to distract enough people to make support for healthcare reform, once wildly popular, now evenly split. Pulling stimulus spending and badly needed federal aid to states away at the worst possible time - an economic slow-down - would be viewed as economic suicide if it weren't for the misinformation campaign of the far right that tells the unemployed the reason they don't have a job is because of the "burden" of big government that must be slashed right now (while taxes should never be raised to Clinton- or Reagan-era levels because that would make the "job-creators" not in the mood to hire (not that they seem in all that much of a rush to hire now after 10 years of tax cuts)). I think the moronic statements on the age of the earth, the role of slavery in the first century of our country or the Civil War, or the non-role of Christianity in the founding of our secular government are all meant as a warm-up, loosening up the audience for the big whoppers about how tax cuts that have neither paid for themselves nor stimulated the economy for the past decade might start working if they were only deeper and longer.
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