I am GIFTING this OpEd from the New York Times. Anyone can click the link and read it. I will also copy and paste parts of the article below.
www.nytimes.com/...
First my own take. Few if any address the “why” and the “who” of the malevolence of the GOP. Krugman does. To stay focused he often doesn’t get to the higher-ups, the puppet masters like Mercer, Koch, Murdoch and the rest.
And there’s often too much focus on Trump, which can make the reader think that it’s Donny’s orchestration when it absolutely is not. Yes tfg is a catalyst and high priest of the cult. He’s a grifter, a bully, and a traitor.
But the oligarchs who are focused on seizing all of our country’s wealth, all OUR wealth, and then dominating our country and us for generations, should be at least noted in every such piece. As my wife likes to tease me, when I miss something she easily saw, it is obvious to the casual observer. Beware the constant distractions.
Understand that They Will Not Relent.
Only we, the vast majority who do see what they are doing and know their horrific goals, can stop them. We finally realized our danger and unified in 2018, 2020 and 2022. It’s the only way our democracy survived the assault they mounted. We’d damn well better stay together and grow far beyond the 74 million votes we achieved in ‘24. When we elected Biden-Harris we saved our democracy. We hired the team that turned around our country, brought us back from the brink and built, amazingly fast, a dynamically progressive economy. Of course there’s far more to do and ultimately we must solve the climate crisis. We wouldn’t have any chance if we hadn’t elected the Dems. We wouldn’t be having any of the great discussions on DKos if we had failed to stay unified, if we’d not overcome the red states’ voter suppression and invalidation.
With that in mind, the excerpts…
Historians of propaganda are familiar with the concept of the Big Lie, a claim so extreme that many people end up accepting it because they can’t believe that authority figures would make up something so at odds with reality.
It often seems to me that we need a term to describe a somewhat similar phenomenon in policy debates, which we might call the Big Grift. What I mean are policy proposals so corrupt, so obviously designed to benefit an undeserving few at everyone else’s expense, that many voters balk at the notion that seemingly respectable politicians actually advocate such things.
A case in point is the current demand by House Republicans that funding for Israel in this moment of crisis be tied to budget cuts that would undermine the ability of the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. This should be a major scandal, but my suspicion is that many voters just won’t accept the idea that G.O.P. leaders would do something so cartoonishly villainous.
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As a result, cutting I.R.S. funding would actually increase the deficit by enabling more tax evasion, a conclusion confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday in its score of the House proposal.
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And making it easier to cheat on taxes by defunding the tax police probably has spillover effects that go beyond the direct adverse effect on enforcement. The more we become a society that rewards people who evade their fiscal obligations, the more likely it is that people who don’t cheat on their taxes will feel like chumps and losers.
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