So, I more or less lost a friend earlier this week when I went from disagreeing with her politics to attacking her personally for holding particular beliefs. It wasn’t a polite thing to do, but I sort of got away from myself, and I just kept punching.
It resonates with the recent discussion about whether Libertarian and Republican politics (for the most part) are just variations on the theme of greedy-greedy-greedy. (Not to say that Democratic politics aren’t frequently the same thing, mind you– lobbies have their own greed, even the lobbies of the left.)
More on hypocrisy, and tending toward lies, discussed by Brad DeLong. Brings up for me the thought that the tax cut business is being pushed just like the war.
Compare: the war was pursued for less than honest and coherent reasons (WMDs being the most obvious fabrication), and it is not a glorious liberation (the looting and the unguarded nuclear waste has if anything made the Middle East more dangerous). So, too, nobody of any account (Mallard Fillmore? Rush Limbaugh?) believes the line that Bush is feeding us about the tax cut– even the conservative journalists say it’s an illogical, sop to the rich and that it’s the sort of thing which could wreck an economy. The Financial Times and the Economist are the sort of publications you’d expect to support the Party of Business. Alan Greenspan says it’s a bad idea. The party rank-and-file disagree with it but are afraid of the backlash from the Bush cronies– they won’t go on the record, because everyone who disagrees with Bush is punished, and punished harshly.
It’s not just a sop to the rich, it’s not just a stupid mistake. It’s a deliberate plan to bankrupt the federal government and forcing it to eliminate its social programs.
And when it’s all over I guess I’ll just have to say I told you so, since I don’t know how to make it stop. Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes, and everybody knows….
Secretly Ironic 