Kaine and the tea party hostage takers
By Norman Leahy | Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 | Politics, VirginiaDemocratic Senate candidate Tim Kaine has joined the chorus of pols who believe the tea party is little more than a criminal gang. In his latest list-building email, Kaine’s copywriter typed the following:
After months of partisan bickering, both parties have finally come together on an agreement that will maintain the full faith and credit of the United States government.
This flawed deal was necessary to stop the Tea Partiers in Congress who held our economy hostage in order to promote their extreme agenda – but it’s not nearly sufficient (Emphasis in the original)
Hostages, extreme agendas…one might be excused for thinking that Mr. Kaine has somehow conflated the debt ceiling debate with “Die Hard.”
But his former excellency has an agenda of his own to peddle, and it includes higher taxes (what some, oddly, call “balance”). But that hardly means he’s done with the tea party and its congressional Quislings:
But the Tea Party and their allies in Congress are still determined to make drastic cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; and they remain opposed to all efforts to close tax loopholes and subsidies for wealthy corporations that are least in need of a handout.
It’s supposed to be a “to the barricades” sentence, but it falls rather flat. While closing tax loopholes would be a great achievement, Kaine has zeroed-in almost exclusively on oil companies. If he were to expand his gaze, say, to ending the Export-Import Bank, or dismantling the subsidies for alternative energies, the mortgage interest deduction, or any of the other carve-outs embedded within the tax code, he might have a point.
Alas, all we’re left with are the scarecrows of the progressive imagination…a tea party that lusts for grandma’s Social Security check and a gaggle of Republican Igors who are eager to do their master’s bidding. Death, mayhem, won’t someone please think of the children?
Hmm. Maybe I’ve broken the code. Kaine’s appeals aren’t written by crack copywriters steeped in the political cliches of the day. They are written by Helen Lovejoy.
(Cross-posted at Score Radio Network)
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About the author
Norm Leahy has written about Virginia and national politics online since 2002, beginning with One Man's Trash (OMT), and continuing through Bacon's Rebellion (both the blog and the e-zine), Sic Semper Tyrannis, NBC12's Decision Virginia, Richmond.com and Tertium Quids. He is the chief blogger at "The Score" and a producer of "The Score" radio show as well as being a Washington Post contributor.
Comments
One Response to "Kaine and the tea party hostage takers"
Kaine’s analysis is based on a lie, one he and his people they know is a lie, albeit one that is very popular and oft-repeated: that default, or credit downgrade, or both would ave been the result of failure to raise the debt ceiling.
Failure to raise the debt ceiling would have had one definitive result: it would have balanced the budget.
In their infinite economy-managing wisdom, the establishment d’s and r’s “knew” that a balanced budget was a bad idea. And so, we don’t have one.
As for Kaine, starting a relationship with an obvious lie only works in politics. In business, not so much. But in Bizarro world, this is yet another illustration why we should trust politicians to manage the economy.
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