The Sunshine Empire

One of the only political blogs you should ever pay attention to is Political Wire. My man Taegan Goddard has a brilliant point in one of his posts about the unsaid consequences of the stimulus bill vote. I have discussed my disagreement with the free spending ways of the Congress so far and how I think the stimulus is just a budget buster in the extreme. But as Goddard notes, the bill includes one of the largest tax cuts in American history. This goes against the standard Republican party play book in ways they may not understand.

For years wrong or right the Republican party has always tarred and feathered the Democratic party as the “Tax and spend party.” Now the Democrats may spend I’ll give you that, but the rip has always been that they want to raise your taxes. The current stimulus package calls for a tax cut for Americans that would be in excess of $250 billion in total. That would rank among the largest in United States history.

Now in the political history of our grand republic the patent line from every Republican candidate since before Reagan has been, “The Democratic candidate will raise your taxes, booooogedy booooogedy boooooooo! But now a Democratic president has signed into law a bill that will give one of the largest tax cuts in American history and it was voted against by every fucking member of the House Republican Caucus? Well here’s what will happen if the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is alive at all. For all the rhetoric of the past couple of campaigns, the message from Republicans has been that a certain House member has voted against an omnibus of some kind that included some kind of tax cut and the message in the political campaign commercials has been through the convoluted Republican logic, “This House member voted against 200 tax cuts and voted for 200 tax increases. We who actually don’t watch American Idol and have a pulse realize that the voting in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate is a bit more complex than that. But House Democrats would be fools not to run commercials saying that the ENTIRE House Republican caucus voted against a tax cut.

I honestly say this having been against the stimulus package in principal, but the House and Senate Republican caucuses have left themselves wide open for the 2012 election cycle.

Related posts:

1. Meghan Takes The High Road And Laura Ingraham Joins The Anorexia Caucus
2. Why Republican Stimulus Doublespeak Matters
3. On the costs of the Iraq war, for the Republican party.
4. Taking John McCain At His Word, Republican Style
5. The Calculus Of Willful Political Amnesia