RON PAUL'S MISTY WATERCOLOR MEMORIES
I caught a bit of Ron Paul's speech tonight. I was particularly struck by this:
It's been -- America has been the greatest country ever, the most prosperous country ever, the largest middle class ever. It’s not that way today. Our middle class is shrinking. The country is getting poorer.
Yeah, schumck, and you know what we had in this country back when we had the largest middle class ever? All kinds of big government programs and expenditures, of the kind you libertarians oppose. The GI Bill. The interstate highway system. FHA loans. Social Security, and eventually Medicare. Evil government! Oh, and (as Paul Krugman never tires of reminding us) a well-regulated banking system (Glass-Steagall!) that was rendered too boring and safe to put the public at risk of having to pay for booms that went bust.
Paul's invocation of the era of the thriving American middle class infuriated me just the way I was infuriated every time Glenn Beck, in his TV heyday, used to weep for the lost America of his viewers' youth. Hey, schmuck, I thought you said we've been living in a fascist nightmare ever since Woodrow Wilson was president! How can your viewers also have lived through a lost Golden Age?
You want to weep for what we had in the mid-twentieth century and lost? Remember how we got it in the first place. It wasn't through unregulated free markets, idiots.
Taxes?
ReplyDeleteTaxes!
You are sadly misinformed, my friend.
Ward Cleaver never sat down Wally and the Beave, and showed them how he had to do his taxes in totally free-market Ike Americana!
Not one episode!!!
And there were no inheritance taxes either, so he could "Leave it to Beaver."
Wally blew any chance at the inheritance when he stole his Mom's fancy dinner pearls to hock, and buy some dope from Eddie Haskell.
Oh, did Ward ever sternly lecture THAT boy!
So, you see, high taxes in the post WWII era was just another Liberal myth.
Just ask "A Conservative Teacher," Steve, he'll tell you!
Btw - he's got the exact same bookcase background as you do on his idiotic website, so you might want to consider making another change.
I wish I had a teacher like him when I was in HS. Oh, the shit my friends and I would have done to him! We'd have come up with amazingly creative new things to make that miserable MFer's life even more miserable.
And here's another happy remnant of the mindset hanging around from that time period that you have to see to believe:
ReplyDeletehttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1xlVoPf5UO4/Twuh_J1UpEI/AAAAAAAAC-U/2muX5d_5yi8/s1600/492869594.jpg
Happy Birthday, Bobby Lee!
Oh, yeah... And MLK, too.
Speaking of birthdays - Arkansas will be closed Monday, January 16th, Martin Luther King Day, to observe Robert E. Lee’s* birthday.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, you just can’t make this shit up.
Maybe when we give Texas back to Mexico we can kick in Arkansas (and Oklahoma) as a consolation prize.
[for the trolls - Robert E. Lee, one of my ancestors, is/was of course the Commanding General of the Confederate Army (Army of the Confederate States of "America")]
Remind me again: why was it a good idea to fight and win the Civil War?
ReplyDeleteLincoln should have let Sherman salt every last square inch of the fucking earth there after he burned every motherfucking thing down to the ground.
ReplyDeleteWe should have Carthaged their asses!
My only consolation is that Ron Paul was born & grew up in Pennsylvania. Moved to Texas after the USAF showed him the bright lights. But I can't be consoled for the fact that he found a Tx congressional district that persists in electing him... unless I look at it Greenwald-style, in which case Paul's district is, I suppose, the "progressive bellwether" of the state.
ReplyDeleteMy other consolation is that Ron's little boy Rand didn't land here.