This is what happens when a Republican Spinning Top starts to rip itself apart.
John Sununu: You're missing the big story, which is that this is in response to a President, the first President in my lifetime, whose decided to run a campaign on class warfare. It's Obama who has opened up the class warfare issue. He attacks success. He says we need to get ahold of more money out of the rich, and he condemns those who are successful with "You didn't build it" and Mitt Romney quantifies this, the constituency he's been pandering too in policy and language as 47% - and all of a sudden you guys make that the story
See, there, can't you see now how what Mitt said is all Obama's fault? He
started it.
There is a point where you wonder where their sanity has fled.
All Obama has suggested is that we partially restore the tax rates we had under President Bill Clinton. That tax rates that produced a surplus while creating over 20 Million Jobs and an exploding economy. That's fact. That's the truth.
Deficit Responsibility via Angry Bear Blog
As this chart shows Bush Era Tax Cuts, the Iraq War and increased benefit spending created by the economic downturn have been the greatest contributors to our deficit. Without these factors, we would very like
Still Have a Surplus.
Asking the people who have the greatest ability to life to put their shoulder into lifting this country up first is not "class warfare" - it's common gorram sense. Asking those who are most vulnerable, barely surviving, struggling to get along to carry more of the weight is just plain ridiculous.
But that's been part of the Republican play book for decades.
President Obama is not the first to deploy "class warfare" tactics during an election. That would be Ronald Reagan when he talked about the mystical magical "Welfare Queen" in 1976.
She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.
That's what
class warfare sounds like. That's creating a phony
straw woman to generate envy and resentment of one set of Americans against another. That's what got Ronald Reagan elected twice.
But the truth is that the real "Welfare Kings and Queens" of this nation, are in the 1%. They are the people who are paying lower taxes than the 47% because They Don't Work. They're living off their investments and dividends, while only paying 15% in Capital Gains taxes. Some of them are using offshore tax shelters to pay even less.
People like Mitt Romney. He's the Welfare Queen, and he's waging War on the rest of us.
Vyan