10.12.07
Sanke Oil & Slime Is All The GOP Has Left
David Sirota’s latest column details the “conservative” tax cut snake oil i no longer selling, Confronting the Hollow Men.
T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, says “the way the world ends” is “not with a bang, but a whimper.” If Eliot were writing today, the hollow men might be America’s conservative ideologues, the world that of the national anti-tax movement, and the whimper the one barely heard on September 12, 2007.
That day, Roll Call, the tiny-circulation Washington newspaper, reported that Republican senators were fretting about “new polling data showing tax cuts are no longer priority No. 1″ with voters. One senior GOP aide admitted that when it comes to tax cuts, “We’ve worn out the message.”
That Republicans’ 30-year anti-tax revolution could ebb with such little fanfare is a testament to how fast public attitudes about taxes are evolving.
Next up Paul Krugman on the GOP’s sliming of a 12 year old, Sliming Graeme Frost.
All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they’re “phony soldiers”; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he’s faking his Parkinson’s symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he’s a fraud.
Meanwhile, leading conservative politicians, far from trying to distance themselves from these smears, rush to embrace them. And some people in the news media are still willing to be used as patsies.
Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call middle-class.
And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately, this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his sister.
I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.
Only those on the extreme right sill buy the snake oil they’re selling and believe their slime.