Monday, November 21, 2011

EARLY DETECTION IS THE KEY TO FIGHTING CANCER

I haven't even had a chance to make my way through David Frum's New York magazine essay "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?," and I absolutely don't want to discourage Frum when he's one of the few insiders anywhere on the political spectrum -- right, center, or left -- who's able to grasp the Republican Party's descent into madness, but I just want to point out a fact glitch in one of his key paragraphs. I've highlighted the misleading passage.

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor." By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are "lucky duckies" because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations -- or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked "churches, synagogues, and mosques." By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed's pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the "greatest central banker in the history of the world," according to Perry's mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to "death panels." A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is "socialism." In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic -recovery program.

I know that Frum is saying that the GOP was a lot less crazy a decade or so ago. But actually, the phrase "lucky duckies" comes from a Wall Street Journal editorial published in 2002.

This brain tumor may have metastasized quite a bit lately, but it's not new. It might not have caused so much irrational behavior if it had been detected and treated early.

5 comments:

BH said...

To perhaps indecently extend the metaphor: unfortunately, judging by the fall 2010 electoral outcome at least, not only has this tumor metastasized in the patient; it's also the first known contagious type.

c u n d gulag said...

One of the biggest problems is that as one of our two parties has gone clinically insane, and the fucking MSM has poo-poo'd the growing craziness and, instead of pulling a Ralph Kramden "Hummana-hummana,' and a "WTF did you just fucking say, you fucking loon?," instead, went into telling the naked Emperor's that their new clothes sure looked fine, while they suck his limp naked schlong.

If the motherfucking dumbass motherfucking, Kochsucking pieces of shit like David Gregory, or the once good, but now ancient, Bob Schieffer, don't act surprised when something stupid, rediculous, and utterly fucking insane, comes out of Republicans mouth's, how is the public to know that these guys are soooooooo far out of the mainstream that they would literally have been confined in an Insane Asylum for what they just said if they said it a few years ago?
Newt Gingrich just came out for child labor. CHILD FUCKING LABOR, for Christ's fucking sake!!! CHILD LABOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And he's a legitimate candidate for President!
Hummana-hummana! WTF?

The slowly boiling frog is a bad analogy until it isn't.

Can you imagine Cronkite or Brinkley ignoring the insanity around them? Russert, sure! But not real journalists!

The biggest problem in this country is the MSM. It's atrocious! Our 4th Estate makes me want to drink a 5th every day.

Stupid?
Evil?
Both?
Well paid, that's for sure!
And why fuck around with a good thing when you're making 7 figures a year for yapping on TV, or working for some tank where the last thing you ever do is have to do is fucking think?

Don't occupy the MSM.
Just fucking find them, shoot them in the fucking head, defecate on their corpses, and look to get their families and do the same to them, lest another Luke Russert, or Mike Wallace, find their way to influence idiot's too ill/mi-informed to realize that they're being played like a deck of fucking marked cards.

I'm in a particularly bad mood today - so, sorry for the fucking obscenities.

Steve M. said...

Newt Gingrich just came out for child labor.

He's hardly the first Republican to do so, as Steve Benen notes.

c u n d gulag said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
c u n d gulag said...

Steve,
Oh, I know. It's just that he's now one of the leaders in the polls - a fact unbelievable in and of itself.

It's one thing when some backwater dipshit Congressperson from Sister-diddler Alabama, or some lunatic Teabagging dumbass Senator from Utah says it - it's another when one of top Republican Presidential candidates comes out and says it.

WTF is wrong with the people in this country?
Child fucking labor?!?!?!
Anyone suggesting something like that ought to be, at best, tarred, feathered, and driven out of town on a rail, not applauded.
Again:
WTF is wrong with the people in this country?
Child fucking labor?!?!?!

Again again:
WTF is wrong with the people in this country?
Child fucking labor?!?!?!