Dana Milbank says we’ve gone from Alternative Facts to Alternative Reality. Clearly he’s right. Up is down, down is up, Hillary is President (on FOX) and Al Franken is Bad For Women, ditto Blumenthal and heaven knows who else. Elephants are so plentiful we can hunt them to our hearts’ content and sell the ivory. Why not? Climate change is obviously a Chinese hoax so drill baby drill in the Arctic and those national monuments can be replaced in a heartbeat so CUT THEM DOWN TO SIZE, like Obama’s memory.
But I digress.
Milbank’s column is about taxes and the inside out, upside down world of Republican “truth,” in which tax increases are tax cuts and the rules are for Democrats.
In the beginning, there were alternative facts. Now we are being governed in an alternate reality.
Heading toward approval of their tax bill this week, House Republicans had a teensy problem: Their vaunted tax “cut” actually was a tax hike for millions of Americans. It lowered taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars on the wealthiest, but it raised the lowest tax rate and, official congressional arbiters determined, raised taxes on a good chunk of the middle class as well.
Awkward! Particularly because a long-standing House rule, put in place by Republicans after Newt Gingrich’s 1994 takeover, requires that any “income tax rate increase may not be considered as passed . . . unless so determined by a vote of not less than three-fifths of the members voting.”
So Republicans did the honorable thing: They snuck in a provision that allowed them, with a simple majority vote, to declare that the three-fifths requirement “shall not apply.” Problem solved.
This is but one example of an unnerving trend in the Trump era: Ignore the rules and disqualify the referees who were put in place to enforce standards of integrity.
I don’t have to tell you guys how dangerous this is. It’s bad enough that the Big Lie has gotten ANOTHER popular vote loser into the White House, the second since 2000. That Big Lie resulted in countless dead people, including thousands of Americans, and wars all over the Middle East, and displaced people — the most since WWII, and it isn’t over, not by a long shot, and may never be over as long as people are making money hand over fist selling weapons and getting paid for “contractors,” ie rent a soldier. Of course the fact that people’s beloved husbands and wives, sons and daughters are getting maimed and killed is of no importance whatsoever when it comes to $$$$$ — I mean — FIGHTING RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM.
Amirite?
I am so disgusted. I don’t know what to say anymore.
I will say this: please — Democrats, progressives — don’t let’s eat our own. YES we must stand up for the oppressed including women. But it should be plenty obvious by now that the Republicans, aided or not by their allies in Russia and other oligarchies, are not playing by any rules that we recognize. They’re out for all the marbles. They intend to eat the US from the inside out.
Just ask Steve Bannon.
He says it and the Conservatives applaud.
Believe them.
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