Sunday, October 6, 2024
Time Magazine came the other day. J. D. Vance was on the cover with the headline “The New Right.”
I had an immediate visceral reaction. “What’s New?” I thought of Newt Gingrich when he was the poster boy for this kind of “movement.” It’s the same old stuff. Maybe, there’s a new face, but it’s the same kind of denial, and lies. The same blame game. Oh, the object of the blame may be different, but it’s really blaming “the other.” There’s always this call to patriotism and the sweeping statements of there having solves to complicated issues without ever stating their fixes.Sometimes they do state a solution, and it doesn’t make sense.
Remember, trickle down economics? It didn’t make sense when Reagan proposed it and it still doesn’t make sense. We have decades of data to back it up.
How about tax and spend Democrats? The data is clear Republicans spend more than Democrats and do nothing to pay for their spending. As Bill Clinton said of the Republicans – their biggest complaint is we don’t clean up their messes quick enough. Republicans talk about being responsible yet they aren’t, and when Democrats try to pay for things via taxes they complain. So yeah, Democrats spend, and Democrats tax, but what about Republicans? Based on looney and false economic principles and theories they spend and spend, put us further in debt and then complain when someone comes along and is responsible.
Remember when W came into office? Clinton left him a $254Billion surplus, which could have gone toward funding Social Security and setting it up to not run out of money. Instead, Bush gave the money away under the false idea that it would stimulate the economy or some such thing. Maybe it did, a little, but not much.
So we’re back int he perennial borrowing to meet Social Security obligations. What’s the Republican solution? Cut Social Security. Maybe get rid of it all together. This is stupid. But like most of the Republican economic plans and certainly The Right’s plans be they New, Old, or Same-O they don’t make sense. They are false narratives. In other words lies. Yet they are believed by huge swaths of the population because they are repeated endlessly on various media outlets. The leader in this disinformation campaign is Fox.
Fox and other Republicans when faced with the stunning economic numbers, numbers they wished they could have had any of the Republican Presidents of the last 50 years, is to say, “What about the price of eggs? And gas?” Yet, the price of eggs is constant and the price of gas is down. I now regularly see gas at or below $3.00.
And then there are the crisis and the diplomatic victories:
– Remember the Trump Admin roll out plan for Covid vaccine?
The incoming Biden team kept asking and they never got an answer. The reason? There was no plan.
And besides Trump said it would go away on its own. It wouldn’t and it didn’t. It took concerted scientific effort and political administrative will to do the job.
– Remember the port crisis after Covid?
It was going to take months to get all the containers shipped out. What happened? Biden sent a team out to work on it and the stuff started getting out. Crisis over.
– How about the big strike by the port workers earlier this past week? Biden’s team and Biden resolved it. Done. No crisis.
– How about Brittney Griner? She was jailed in Putin’s Russia. It was unjust and Biden’s team got her out. Various people complained that we gave away too much and what about the others being held like Paul Whelan? Why wasn’t he released instead of Griner? Answer from Biden, “That wasn’t the offer on the table.”
– Remember Paul Whelan? Yeah, Biden got him out too. And in that same deal he got out the young woman who put little protest price tags on aisle shelves in Russia.
– What about the turn around in our economy from Covid? We keep getting reports that show how well the economy is doing. This to the consternation of people like Laura Ingraham and whomever the replacement was for Tucker Carlson. At least the Fox Business folks are truthful enough to say, “If I had these numbers I’d run on them too.”
– Then there is the mess left by Trump pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. Pull out for no reason and get nothing. Great work (you idiot.)
– Let’s not forget giving Northern Syria to Putin. This allowed both Turkey and Assad to go in and kill our allies. The ones who actually did the fighting to defeat the Caliphate. We had like fifty people providing air support and guaranteeing the freedom to those people and Trump handed it to Putin. Even Putin was smiling when it happened.
– There was the deal to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban. Something orchestrated by Trump. He got the head of the Taliban out of jail. Wanted to bring him to Camp David. Told him when we were pulling out. Drew down the troop levels to almost nothing just before leaving office and then complained when the withdrawal didn’t go smoothly under Biden, who was left with little or no choice. Trump bragged about doing that.
