Wow – someone must’ve slipped a dose of special Viagra to Barack Obama, for his backbone has suddenly stiffened!
Finally showing a bit of real populist fervor, the President drew a line in the sand for plutocratic Congressional Republicans. He declared that the would veto any deficit plan that cuts Medicare but lets multimillionaires keep paying a lower tax rate than middle class families. He called for a minimal tax hike on those making more than a million dollars a year, an uptick that would affect fewer than 450,000 privileged Americans who can easily absorb the increase.
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But – oh! – the operatic screams of agony from the chorus of Republican harpies in Congress. So jolted were they by the very idea that the rich would be required to share our nation’s budgetary burden, that they raced to the barricades of wealth, from which they lobbed rhetorical firebombs at Obama. “Class war!” shrieked the GOP’s House budget chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan. For Ryan to utter that phrase is such gross hypocrisy that I’m amazed he didn’t gag on the words, choke, and expire on the spot. This is, after all, the guy who rammed a budget through the House this spring that would’ve killed Medicare for America’s seniors, while protecting the multibillion-dollar subsidies for Big Oil. How classy is that?
Ryan & Party have consistently voted for policies that’ve held down the poor, knocked down middle-class income, and shoved practically all of the wealth created in America during the past decade straight uphill into the pockets of the superrich. That, Mr. Ryan, is classic class war.
Obama nailed the GOP’s whine for the poppycock it is, noting that his proposal “is not class warfare. It’s math.” Yes – and it’s something else, too, something essential for a democratic society. It’s basic fairness.
“A Call for Fairness,” The New York Times, September 20, 2011.
“A Tax Others Embrace, U.S. Opposes,” www.nytimes.com, September 20, 2011.
“Republican Lawmakers Equate Obama Tax Plan With ‘Class Warfare,'” The New York Times, September 19, 2011.
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