Coming into the final, torturous days of the awful reign of the Bush Cabal, I've been thinking that the entire enterprise can be summed up in three words: Bait-and-Switch.
Hasn't every single endeavor they have engaged been a bait-and-switch? Case in point: The "War on Terror."
The Bushies declared war on a feeling, then went into Afghanistan and failed to catch Osama bin Laden. That was the bait. At that point, Americans had accepted the "war on terror" frame, so they simply switched the frame to include Iraq. To this day, you'll hear Bushies and other war defenders claiming that Iraq is a central front in the war on terror.
Same thing with the tax cuts. No president in history has ever cut taxes in a time of war, and there's a good reason - because war costs a lot of money, especially if you're planning to outsource and privatize every aspect of it. (At this point, 40% of our war budget goes to private contractors.) But never mind - the Clintonian surplus was bad, and debt was good. So Bush screamed from the high heavens that he had just made American living so much more easy and beautiful by cutting our taxes. Remember when you got that refund check in the mail? Wow, free money from the government! Bush is teh awesomest preznit evah!
That was the bait. But what Bush and his cabal really did was to switch the true tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans. It turned out that check in the mail was just an advance on next year's refund - a fact which was quite deliberately obscured by the Administration. Now, in the interminable sixth year of our long national nightmare, the dollar is weaker than the Canadian dollar. Meanwhile, rich Americans are becoming richer, while working Americans are poorer, have less health insurance, and are losing their houses. And as for the Clintonian surplus, well, do the words "Trillion-Dollar Deficit" mean anything to you?
But what is his solution for this economic crisis? Making the tax cuts permanent! As Atrios would say, Wheeeeeeeeee!
It's all in a day's work for the Bait-and-Switch Administration.
Hasn't every single endeavor they have engaged been a bait-and-switch? Case in point: The "War on Terror."
The Bushies declared war on a feeling, then went into Afghanistan and failed to catch Osama bin Laden. That was the bait. At that point, Americans had accepted the "war on terror" frame, so they simply switched the frame to include Iraq. To this day, you'll hear Bushies and other war defenders claiming that Iraq is a central front in the war on terror.
Same thing with the tax cuts. No president in history has ever cut taxes in a time of war, and there's a good reason - because war costs a lot of money, especially if you're planning to outsource and privatize every aspect of it. (At this point, 40% of our war budget goes to private contractors.) But never mind - the Clintonian surplus was bad, and debt was good. So Bush screamed from the high heavens that he had just made American living so much more easy and beautiful by cutting our taxes. Remember when you got that refund check in the mail? Wow, free money from the government! Bush is teh awesomest preznit evah!
That was the bait. But what Bush and his cabal really did was to switch the true tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans. It turned out that check in the mail was just an advance on next year's refund - a fact which was quite deliberately obscured by the Administration. Now, in the interminable sixth year of our long national nightmare, the dollar is weaker than the Canadian dollar. Meanwhile, rich Americans are becoming richer, while working Americans are poorer, have less health insurance, and are losing their houses. And as for the Clintonian surplus, well, do the words "Trillion-Dollar Deficit" mean anything to you?
But what is his solution for this economic crisis? Making the tax cuts permanent! As Atrios would say, Wheeeeeeeeee!
It's all in a day's work for the Bait-and-Switch Administration.
1 comment:
wonderful summary.....so sad that it is so true
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