Follow politics long enough and you'll get used to the sort of cognitive dissonance that derives from, you know, actually caring about shit and watching the leaders in whom you'd invested with your own caring pursuing their own agendas, which inevitably diverge from yours. With some leaders -- with Barack Obama more than any I can remember -- this dissonance can achieve a deafening level of discordance. ("It's landmark legislation that enshrines the principle of universal health care in America forever!") ("It's a legislative atrocity that delivers 40 million new customers to rapacious insurance companies without bending the cost curve or establishing any acceptable level of public option!") And so, my dear fellow Kossacks, in moments like this, to whom can a good Democrat turn to learn the truth? To whom else? Follow me over the fold, where the shadow Senator from the Great State of Oxycontin and humble ambassador to (certain neighborhoods in) the Dominican Republic explains to us whether or not we should support the pending tax deal...
cross-posted at popletters.
I Hope Obama's Tax Deal Fails
Um...doesn't take more than that headline to make me take a step backward and check my sanity. It is an article of faith for me, as for you, that whatever Limbaugh is for, I'm against, with the possible exception of certain moderate levels of recreational narcotic use. And for the past week or so, I (as have you) have spent too many minutes per day inveighing -- in print, in person, in my head -- against the manifold perfidies of this tax deal. Hundreds of billions in tax cuts for wealthy households at a time when America is drowning in debt? Giving away the best class-based wedge issue one can possibly imagine at a time of horrific economic strife? It was, for me, the last straw. I wrote to the White House. I hung up angrily on a Democratic Party telephone solicitor. I (shudder) unsubscribed from OFA.
And then I started noticing the counter-argument:
Obama has secured - with Republican backing - a big new stimulus that will almost certainly goose growth and lower unemployment as he moves toward re-election. If growth accelerates, none of the current political jockeying and Halperin-style hyper-ventilation will matter. Obama will benefit - thanks, in part, to Republican dogma...
...And look how instantly the GOP's position has shifted. They have suddenly gone from pure oppositionism to dealing with the dreaded commie Muslim alien, thereby proving he is not what they have made him out to be. The more often we get the GOP to make actual tangible decisions on policy alongside Obama, the less able they will be able to portray him as somehow alien to the country, and the more they will legitimize him. Their House victory means they can no longer sit out there, portraying the country as somehow taken over by radical, alien forces - which they can simply oppose with ever ascending levels of hysteria and rhetoric. And the more practical and detailed and concrete the compromises, the less oxygen blowhards like Palin and Limbaugh will have to breathe.
Yes, it's Andrew. And for many (occasionally including myself) Andrew kinda doesn't count. But then lots of commentators started saying the same thing: that Obama somehow snookered the Republicans into allying with him to pump close to a trillion dollars of stimulus into the economy over the next two years, leading up to...well, you know.
Eleven-Dimension Chess, anyone?
Look. I'm being snarky because, well, I'm a snarky person. And in so many ways I can't stand this deal -- indeed, at times I genuinely feel this way about this president. I understand neither the decisions he makes nor the priorities he brings to the table, unless, as too many Kossacks have argued in recent weeks even to decide which diarists to link to, he's just a hopelessly pragmatic, centrist, consensus-obsessed Wall Street shill who's getting right now the Congress and mandated-centrism priorities he has wanted all along.
But I can't deny that the deal that's going to go through is going to support millions of Americans who need it most, pump hundreds of billions into the economy (even if not in the way that would be most effective) and (and this is the point that Andrew was the first pundit to notice, as far as I know) convince the new Tea Party Congress to join hands with Obama to pass major new economic legislation. Thereby depriving the Palins and --
oh right. That reminded me that I wanted to know what Rush thought.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: My friends, if we have yet to persuade you that the tax deal, as it's being called, should not happen --
Aha! I knew it! Already I feel like an idiot for sending that email to the White House promising not to vote for Obama in 2012. Oh well, I can tell this story to the undecideds I'm calling in Ohio on November 1st, 2012...
As we've pointed out all week, there's nothing stimulative about tax rates staying the same. That stimulus has already occurred within the immediate years after taxes were cut back in 2001 and 2003. There's no new stimulus that's gonna come from extending. There's no stimulus associated with a one-year, 2% tax rate cut in the payroll tax.
Um...what? Rush is using semantics to argue that extending the Bush tax cuts won't stimulate the economy, compared with letting them expire and watching everyone's taxes go up starting in a few weeks? Suddenly keeping tax rates low doesn't help the economy by Fattypants' lights? Something's fishy...
So where is the stimulus? Why does Obama keep talking about stimulus? Well, take a look at all the spending in this bill. This ethanol is just the tip of the iceberg. They're loading all kinds of spending into this bill, and that's why Obama's calling it stimulus. Effectively what he's getting here is a second stimulus bill.
Well, okay, yeah, until a couple weeks ago everyone on Earth thought that after the last election another stimulus was completely, irrevocably impossible, that Republicans would never vote for any legislation that helps the economy while Obama is in office, and instead we're, um, watching the Republican Party sign on to a huge stimulus bill that could very well help the economy considerably while Obama is in office, but...
Tax cuts for rich people! Bernie Sanders doesn't like it! Obama sucks...
Does the name Steve Schwarzman mean anything to you? Stephen Schwarzman is a Republican. He has been involved in Republican fundraising, but he founded the Blackstone Group. The Blackstone Group is a humongous investment vehicle. Pete Peterson, a former Commerce secretary with Nixon is part of this group, and they're huge. He's a Republican. Steve Schwarzman is leaving the country. He's announced he's moving to Paris. He says half the country is doing it right, but we're not. It's a direct comment on Obama. The move is not permanent but he's getting out of the country the next three to six months to conduct business. He doesn't like being a target. Carried interest is how the Blackstone Group makes its money and that's an area for tax increases Obama is targeting, carried interest, the hedge funds. So he's getting out of the country. He has the means, the ability. He's not renouncing citizenship, but he's just getting out. He wants to go someplace else to conduct business.
Ah. That's it. Rush is mad because Obama's support for cutting taxes on rich people and businesses means, um, he's planning to raise taxes on rich people and businesses. Clearly this is not Rush's real opinion. You see, as we know, whenever Rush says something, we have to filter said words through the prism of our long-held and seasoned knowledge that Rush Limbaugh is a highly skilled, hyper-partisan dickhead.
So what's his real deal?
Now, Bernie Sanders, the only admitted socialist in the House of Representatives, and a lot of other Democrats are just beside themselves, when in fact this deal is giving them a lot of what they want or claim to want. There's a lot of pork in it, more added each day, ethanol just the latest. There are no tax cuts. Look, there is a tax cut, the 2% payroll tax cut for one year, but that's it. There aren't any tax cuts.
Okay, now I know something's really bothering Rush, because he doesn't say stupid shit that doesn't make -- well, okay, actually he does. But Rush: Senator Sanders is not in the House. And "There are no tax cuts" and "There aren't any tax cuts" are mutually inconsistent statements. Here's the reality, Rush: the Republicans deliberately passed tax cuts with the intention of having them expire at the end of this year. Absent any new laws, those temporary tax cuts will expire. So this new legislation will indeed be cutting taxes across the board.
And, by the way, Obama says he's gonna raise the upper rate come hell or high water at the end of these two years. This is just an election year move to come back during his reelection, get his leftist base back on board by once again going after tax increases for the rich during a presidential campaign.
It's so cute how Rush genuinely seems to believe that the President actually gives a shit what we think, isn't it? Yes, I'm writing this diary, but no, I am not that deluded.
So, what is Rush's real deal?
They had two years to deal with this. The new Congress coming in will fix it, if the GOP leadership will allow it. If the economy continues in its recession, as I said yesterday, what is this double-dip stuff? To have a second recession you have to get out of the first one. We're still in the first one. If this recession continues, it's because of Obama's anti-capitalist policies, and the Democrat Congress' inability to deal with the budget and tax rates. Put it off on them. Why should we bail them out? This is their mess.
Ding.
DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING
See, Rush is not stupid. Venal, greedy, swinish, malevolent, pathologically dishonest, sure -- but not stupid. He gets it. Notice how uninterested he is in talking about dismantling Social Security in 2013 or so? Maybe even now he suspects that the 11th-dimensional-chess player is setting up that battle deliberately? I don't know. I'm terrified for Social Security too. But the country's middle class is drowning now, today, this minute, and President Obama just put the Tea Party's fingerprints on the lifeline.
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about all this. But I do feel at peace with this deal this morning, for the first time since the news broke. And I have you-know-who to thank for that.
</snark>
Rush hates it. At a certain level, that's good enough for me.