So a lot of coverage over Matt Drudge's strange Obamacare care mandate tweet last month has drawn a lot of criticism for being very likely false. Which I think is appropriate.
However, in the course of attacking the validity of the claim in itself, I think Dems missed a chance to strike an even larger blow over the validity of the overall Conservative ideology.
Matt Drudge made paying taxes an act of Conservatism.
We all know what the Conservative strategy is when it comes to taxes, and they have leveraged it magnificently. Hey, you hate paying taxes, right? Vote for us, and your taxes will go down! We won't have as much revenue to pay for services, but don't worry, everything will be just dandy.
Thanks to Matt Drudge, Dems now have a Republican-brand spin on paying taxes.
We pay taxes for freedom!
We pay an income tax to have the freedom to spend the rest of that income any way we want. So I can eat every meal at In n Out if I want. I can choose to buy my children football gear instead of books. That's freedom.
We pay a payroll tax to have any type of company we want. I can run a restaurant, store, or consulting service. I can employ four employees or four hundred. I can choose to have one, two, or even three offshore tax haven accounts. I can choose to run a dental dam for cats business if I want, don't know how successful it would be, but hey. That's freedom.
We pay a gas tax to have gas guzzling behemoths, to drive a distance we could easily walk, to make drinking and texting and tweeting, and anything really, much more dangerous. That's freedom.
Every tax you pay is a chance to Freedom it up.
In a way, I've always considered taxes in this manner. Taxes are one of the many (reasonable) costs of living in a civilized, functioning, and yes, free society. Most of us who frequently this site understand this. But we are not the target of the Matt Drudge tweet. It is this crowd that should find this line of reasoning most difficult to reconcile with their chosen ideology, if anything would.
Of course, for a lot of the crowd that this tweet is directed at, no amount of deductive reasoning is enough to expose the facade of their ideology.
And sure, a lot of them are probably well aware of the contradictory nature of paying the individual penalty a liberty tax but not seeing other taxes in the same way, and probably don't care and will continue to do so.
But does Matt Drudge honestly think paying a tax can be a form of expressing his personal liberty? If so, how can it possibly not apply to paying taxes in general?
Drudge may not have any credibility with our wing, but his line of reasoning for paying the individual mandate could be a tool for undermining his - Conservatives like him - credibility amongst the wing they have built up, filled with people who hate taxes indiscriminately.
For all the time that is spent on exposing people like Drudge's dishonesty, there should be more time spent on undermining the very heart of Conservatism it goes against. I mean, we do spend a lot of time on that too. But here is basically an unforced error, which do not come often enough. Here they have one of their movement icons going against the extreme and uncompromising irrationality that represents their very nature.
That would probably get him to walk back his statements far more than just pointing out how dishonest he is. You're telling the crowd that you've built up on hating taxes that you love paying this tax. You've even proclaimed that you'll pay it for life. Guess you wanna see Obamacare last in perpetuity!
Obamacare itself is a perfect illustration of the power of this attack. As we should all be aware, the ACA is not a Liberal plan by any means. It was birthed in a Conservative think tank, first implemented by a Republican Governor, and for all intents and purposes, was a Republican health policy.
Then they abandoned it for the sake of placating the Tea Party caucus. And as if it was some sort of disadvantage, even gifted the name to President Obama. It is an example of a brilliant political coup. And now look at where the Republican Party finds itself. Unable to present any replacement health plan; Obamacare was their plan. So now they have to choose between attacking their own plan, or having nothing at all.
The Drudge tweet presents an opportunity to do the much of the same rhetoric-poaching with taxes.
For a second, let's stop questioning whether or not the tweet is accurate. Let's ask, hey, why not use Drudge's triumphant proclamation against them?