Much of madness, and more of spin...
The election showed pretty conclusively that the public is fed up with Republican rule. After all, it was Bush's faux-liberal patter that made him popular, not his actual reactionary policies-- which largely went ignored by the press until it was too late.
It was hardly surprising to hear right-wing pundits still try to spin the electoral loss as a victory for conservatism, because that's what they do. But judging from some pieces that appeared on the Prospect's blog today, the practical result could be that the right-wing gets even more insanely right-wing. As in maybe the Republican party should become the Objectivist party.
In this twofer, we see that George Will is arguing against any sort of minimum wage-- because the Industrial Revolution was such a golden age for workers, presumably. Then there's the loony suggestion that Al Qaida attacked the US because they hate our secular society. The prescription, apparently, is turning America into an imperialist Christian theocracy. Then Muslim extremists will undoubtedly be thrilled with us.
And in more tax nonsense from Bizarroworld, Larry Kudlow conjures up the spectre of the Wall Street Journal's notorious "lucky ducky" editorial:
Kudlow: Today’s New York Times has a classic, class warfare argument from a Congressional Budget Office analysis from 2004 tax data that purports to show "Bush Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich” but actually shows that the top 1 percent of income earners paid about 37 percent of all federal income taxes—a big jump from prior years.
Klein: And do you know why that is? Here's a hint. The top 1% saw their incomes jump by 18 percent in 2004, for a total of 53 percent of the income growth. That means one out of every two dollars in higher wages that year went to a member of the top percentile.
The good news is that this lunacy will never fly with the public. The bad news is that the right has already managed to trick Americans into buying it once by simply lying.
It was hardly surprising to hear right-wing pundits still try to spin the electoral loss as a victory for conservatism, because that's what they do. But judging from some pieces that appeared on the Prospect's blog today, the practical result could be that the right-wing gets even more insanely right-wing. As in maybe the Republican party should become the Objectivist party.
In this twofer, we see that George Will is arguing against any sort of minimum wage-- because the Industrial Revolution was such a golden age for workers, presumably. Then there's the loony suggestion that Al Qaida attacked the US because they hate our secular society. The prescription, apparently, is turning America into an imperialist Christian theocracy. Then Muslim extremists will undoubtedly be thrilled with us.
And in more tax nonsense from Bizarroworld, Larry Kudlow conjures up the spectre of the Wall Street Journal's notorious "lucky ducky" editorial:
Kudlow: Today’s New York Times has a classic, class warfare argument from a Congressional Budget Office analysis from 2004 tax data that purports to show "Bush Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich” but actually shows that the top 1 percent of income earners paid about 37 percent of all federal income taxes—a big jump from prior years.
Klein: And do you know why that is? Here's a hint. The top 1% saw their incomes jump by 18 percent in 2004, for a total of 53 percent of the income growth. That means one out of every two dollars in higher wages that year went to a member of the top percentile.
The good news is that this lunacy will never fly with the public. The bad news is that the right has already managed to trick Americans into buying it once by simply lying.
posted by Matt Sandwich | 5:37 PM
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