Nothing better on a Sunday morning as you await the zombie parade to begin on the weekly You-Say-Your-Talking-Points-And-Then-I'll-Say-Mine shows that pass for political discourse on the Tee-Vee than this - stumbling across someone else writing exactly what you would like to say if you had the skills and time that they display. I was giddy with disbelief as this amazing headline scrolled by in my news search:
GOP's New Moral Monstrosity: Trickle Down Lies Enrich The 1%, As Wing Nuts Assert Control
Like the headline? How about the tagline under it?
Republican extremists have outlined two demented budgets loaded with phony numbers. Why won't Democrats fight back?
These refreshingly non-circumspect tell-it-like-it-is headers come courtesy of Bill Curry and Salon. They alone are worthy of sending over a boatload of cronuts and lattes to the Salon offices in gratitude but the article that follows is worth a boatload more.
The article itself is just as pithy and insightful as the headline leads one to hope for. Republicans are advancing budgets and numbers that should lead to recoils and revulsion combined with expulsion from polite society, if anyone on the Democratic side of the ledger cared enough to point it out.
Take it away Bill Curry! (The "both budgets he refers to are the Republican budgets in both the Congress and the Senate)
The human carnage contemplated by both budgets is beyond accounting. Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a liberal-leaning analyst lauded for his impeccable methodology and mastery of fiscal policy. Greenstein estimates that two-thirds of the cuts come from the quarter of the budget that serves the poor and working poor. A man known to measure his words, Greenstein says it would leave the government a “shell” of its former self and make America a “coarser and less humane nation with higher levels of poverty and inequality.”
Even after slashing non-defense discretionary spending to its lowest level since World War II, Republicans can’t achieve a balanced budget– the holy grail of their rhetoric, not their policy—without resorting to something called “dynamic scoring.” In essence, dynamic scoring means that in projecting future revenue and spending you take into account the effect of your budget on your economy. All large budgets make measured bets on the economy but what Republicans do here is much more dangerous, and also dishonest.
On purely ideological grounds they say that overnight their unholy combination of miserly spending cuts for the poor and profligate tax cuts for the rich will juice economic growth by nearly 50 percent, unleashing a cascade of revenue. It’s faith-based accounting based on supply-side economics and it’s never worked. But in the spirit of Florida Gov. Rick Scott forbidding state officials from uttering the words “global warming” and “climate change,” the Republicans have ordered their formerly non-partisan budget analysts to apply the theory. It’s how their whole budget works; like a sleight of hand street hustle, a shell game with no pea.
See what a great job he did in eviscerating those budgets on both moral and fiscal grounds in very few words? There's no doubt whose ox is gored by the Republicans and whose calf is fatted. The Republican budget is "To Serve Mankind" a la The Twilight Zone.
Curry then calls out the Democrats for their feckless, passionless, clueless responses to both these budgets and budgets past, where they bravely fight off the impending carnage with "overly scripted Democrats hurl stale talking points at a budget they could tear to shreds with logic, evidence, specificity and just a tiny bit of boldness."
He skewers Obama for countering the 2011 budget as a "Trojan Horse for Social Darwinism", calling it a "stinging reproof" for those who doubled majored in sociology and the classics, while what the public would have understood is telling them that it doubled health costs from $6,000 to $12,000 dollars for seniors with incomes of $26,000.
Curry cites the Democrats for timidity, cowardice and self-serving in their reluctance to confront the issues faced and being the actual as opposed to the pretend champion of the people.
I leave you with close to to his last words:
"The Republican budget is a fiscal, economic and moral monstrosity. If Democrats can’t unmask it they don’t deserve the support of the millions who still rely on them to act as their tribunes" .
All I can add is my own heartfelt "Amen, Brother!"