The New Creationism

"Job creators." It's the latest fabricated, tested, packaged and presented message, pronounced and announced, sucked and plucked, read and spread by the credulous. Unquestioned by the actual media (were there any) and repeated and mistreated by the hacks of the hacker.

"In a recession, you don't tax the job-creators," said John Boehner.

Once again, R policy fits nicely on a bumper sticker, and is neither questioned nor countered effectively; partly, because the refutation won't fit on a bumper sticker, partly because no one wants to hear it, partly because the so-called media don't care. So it lingers, like a fart in an air-tight room.

How interesting it would be, were anyone to ask the speaker to explicate. How does it work, exactly, sir? You lower taxes on businesses and they hire workers? To do what? Will they hire workers to produce stuff that people aren't buying? If people are buying, will "job creators" not want to hire and make a profit because they'd have to pay taxes? If this latest form of creationism is true, wouldn't the above chart be accompanied by another that showed spectacular (or even mildly noteworthy) job growth ever since George of the jumble?

I don't have a problem with the idea that successful businesses create jobs; it's certainly true. Nor would I argue with the proposition that there's a point at which tax rates can be stifling. But where's the evidence that hiring has to do with tax rates? It's bass-ackwards, as I've said. How does Boehner intend to show that our current employment problems have anything to do with the historically low rates now in effect?

Once again, what's really at stake is who we are. What's at the center of the so-called debate is choosing between very different visions of our future. Ironically, it's the party that claims we are a Christian nation whose view is the more unchristian -- you know: camels, eyes of needles, love your neighbor. Commie shit like that.

It's more than unchristian, of course: it's unamerican, coming from the party of patriots. It's willingness to throw everyone but the very wealthy overboard to maintain indefensible tax rates. And they don't even hide it. Here's Mitch McConnell, admitting it:

WASHINGTON -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), under siege from conservatives over his opt-out proposal for the debt ceiling debate, defended the idea in crassly political terms during an interview on Wednesday morning.

The Kentucky Republican, appearing on Laura Ingraham's program, repeatedly pointed to the political toil that congressional Republicans endured during the mid-'90s when they squared off against then-President Bill Clinton over government spending.

"[W]e knew shutting down the government in 1995 was not going to work for us. It helped Bill Clinton get reelected. I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy," McConnell said. "It didn't work in 1995. What will happen is the administration will send out to 80 million Social Security recipients and to military families and they will all start attacking members of Congress. That is not a useful place to take us. And the president will have the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for all this disruption."

The reference, of course, is to his too-clever-by-two-thirds ploy to let Obama raise the debt limit without any Rs having to vote for it. We know what's right, he says; we're just not gonna do it, because it could help Obama. Screw the country? Who cares? And what about his implication that the bad economy has nothing to do with Republican policies of the past ten years? Who'd buy that, other than the RWS™, the propagandists of Fox "news," and every teabagger in the country? Or, how about this: after their threats and refusals, after President Obama has more than compromised on every aspect of budget "negotiations," they've resorted to claiming it's Obama who's doing the hostage-taking.

Bad economics. Stupidity. Lies. Blatant partisanship over the needs of the country. No wonder the teabaggers love the Republicans.

Lazy journalists. Ineffective Democrats. Magical thinking by a deliberately dumbified public. No wonder their crap sells.