Looking at the jobs report, and I noticed Atrios didn’t use the term “lucky duckies.” I forget that a lot of you may not be aware of all internet traditions and may not remember the origins of lucky duckies:
ucky duckies is a term that was used in Wall Street Journal editorials starting on 20 November 2002 to refer to Americans who pay no federal income tax because they are at an income level that is below the tax line (after deductions and credits). The term has outlived its original use to become a part of the informal terminology used in the tax reform debate in the United States.
The Journal defined the term in this way:
Who are these lucky duckies? They are the beneficiaries of tax policies that have expanded the personal exemption and standard deduction and targeted certain voter groups by introducing a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education. When these escape hatches are figured against income, the result is either a zero liability or a liability that represents a tiny percentage of income.
The worry of the Journal’s editorialist was that “as fewer and fewer people are responsible for paying more and more of all taxes, the constituency for tax cutting, much less for tax reform, is eroding. Workers who pay little or no taxes can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else. They are also that much more detached from recognizing the costs of government.”
You are so poor you don’t have to pay taxes- you lucky bastard!
That was 2002, when I was deep, deep in the kool-aid. Made me realize that when I actually think about it, the right wing didn’t just become insane recently. I just snapped out of it and realized they were crazy, and have been for quite some time.
Montysano
Yeah, this is a surefire retort to the conservative meme of “Rich people pay all the taxes”. I’ve used it many times. It works better than “STFU” and is classier also, too.
Zifnab
It comes of being completely unable to fathom the idea of true poverty. You’ve got a roof over your head? You’ve got a cell phone? What are you complaining about? I have to pay taxes, the greatest burden any American has ever had to bare.
Bullsmith
The underlying logic is truly insidious here. The more wealth is concentrated in a few hands, the more of the overall tax burden goes with it, leading to yet more crying about how unfairly overtaxed they are. They have no problem with controlling 80% of the nation’s wealth, but asking them to pay 80% of the taxes is clearly communism.
Rosalita
you can only keep your money if you already have lots of it. can’t give breaks to the young bucks.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
One of my coworkers is one of those Republicans who worries that his money might go to some undeserving person (he once refused to take a card at a restaurant we went to that would have given the taxes from his meal to Habitat for Humanity). He had been spouting this line that nearly 20% of all income came from the government. I went and looked up Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment, which actually comes out to about 4% of all income and sent that information to him. His response was this USA Today article, which also includes Social Security in this number. When I challenged him on that, asking him why he would want to include money he paid into it – and that there are plenty of Congresspeople who would gladly not give him that money – he responded with stories of his wife’s relatives who claim to have bad backs and yet are working on their farms. Let no amount of facts get in the way of your beliefs, I guess.
LosGatosCA
‘have been for quite some time’
Impeachment anyone?
JohnR
As Christ said: “Fuck the poor. Lazy-ass freeloaders! Let them eat manna.”
Hunter Gathers
I guess sales tax and payroll taxes don’t count.
Alesis
Amen. Welcome to the hard left Brother!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
OT: Al Qaeda has put out a statement that bin Laden is dead. So the only people who don’t believe it now are the wingers in this country.
...now I try to be amused
Fixed. Conveniently forgot payroll and sales taxes there.
General Stuck
The bidness geeks here can correct me if wrong. But the tick up in UR likely means people coming off the sidelines and getting black into looking for a job due to better hiring scene. Of course this is all insane, due to insanity, and why Americans are even gloomier about the economy due to strong hiring. Oil prices plunge, but gas prices go up. Wingnuts are wingnuts and George Bush got Obama, whilst Osama plays golf and waits for instructions from all the adult white folk. And everything is spelled xactly how it should be in this comment.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hunter Gathers:
Locally, we’ve got a city income tax on the ballot. Some “expert” is saying that it’s unfair because Oregon already has the highest tax rate in the country.
Which is kinda true, if you only look at income taxes.
Problem is, Oregon has no sales tax.
Ooops. The guy has utterly ignored that in other states, the overall tax rate, not just the income tax rate, is higher due to things like…sales taxes.
Try again, dumbshit.
TaMara (BHF)
I think I love you. Oh, wait did I say that out loud? No, really I’m just glad you snapped out of it. I think that perspective makes you one of the more intelligent bloggers out there.
Omnes Omnibus
@LosGatosCA:
No, thank you.
Napoleon
I just turned 50 and I can recall conversations with hard core Republicans in the mid-70s where if you pushed them hard enough or they let down their guard there was nothing you don’t hear from the wingnuts today that they wouldn’t agree with. Social Security is theft, the govenment has no right to progressive taxation, etc., etc., etc.
In a lot of ways over my 50 years I have been more conservative then many of my fellow Dems (though have become much more liberal recently) but the knowledge that when push came to shove the Republicans would completely equate the good of the country to the good of the top 1% made me stick with the Dems.
Poopyman
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): You’re going to believe al Qaeda? You must be a terrist yourself, aintcha?
Damned liberals.
Hunter Gathers
Or my property taxes, the taxes in my utility and phone bills, the gas tax, and my state income taxes don’t really count either. The only taxes that count are the ones paid by our permanently persecuted upper-class betters, who need their tax burdens reduced to deal with the rise in the price of hookers and blow.
Muley Graves
Looters and moochers. Or lucky duckies, if you prefer. The meaning is the same.
They are all Galt, in their minds, those evil people who would describe their fellow citizens and human beings in such a manner.
The reality of the situation is far different. Far from Rand’s vision of a Solyent-Green type apocalypse where society breaks down and we all are forced into cannibalism and homosexuality, eventually to perish wholesale due to our own ineptitude, the irony here is that if every one of these self-imagined captains of industry, the Atlases of our dreary and hateful modern society, were to “shrug” and go camping for eternity in Galt’s Gulch, we’d all be much happier.
Poopyman
@General Stuck:
Yeah, I was gonna say ….
Omnes Omnibus
@Hunter Gathers: If the economy really collapses (see Ryan’s four point economic plan), the price of hookers will drop. Supply and demand.
Bob
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/terrorism-is-a-tactic-but-osama-made-it-a-goal/238411/
Megan writes:
“The worst thing about the past ten years: to the extent that he “won”, it’s because he tricked us into scoring a bunch of own-goals, not because he was a better player.”
She’s still drinking the Kool-Aid
Jeff R.
The best reaction to the editorial at the time was Jonathan Chait’s:
Villago Delenda Est
@Hunter Gathers:
Which is why the capital gains tax needs to be reduced, again, so that the Galtian overlords will have an incentive to actually hire a few more people in this country.
Or something.
Pay no attention to where the actual hiring is being done.
Adam Smith devoted entire CHAPTERS of The Wealth of Nations to why overlords with brains wanted to increase worker wages as they could…because the payoff down the road justified it. But not our short term MBA types…who want ROI NOW, hookers and blow NOW.
cleek
OT:
for all you people who just couldn’t take Obama’s word for it, will you take al qaeda’s word for it ?
Poopyman
@Napoleon:
Over my 57 years I don’t think I’ve become that much more liberal. It’s just that everyone else — including vast numbers of Dems — have swung far rightward. Today’s mainstream Dem is just about where the average 1970s Republican was, and the average Republican today is, well, insane, per John’s post.
General Stuck
Obama getting Osama is better news for Peak Wingnut
RSA
I think that this, aside from the “lucky duckies” phrase, is also suggestive. It’s the assumption that tax cutting and tax reform are valuable in themselves, independent of what those taxes are used for–normal people think of ” child care and education” as being good things, to be supported.
Poopyman
@Muley Graves:
Fixticated.
Villago Delenda Est
@cleek:
Obama knocked off Osama in an internal Al Qaida power struggle, dontcha know.
Jim Pharo
Hard not to credit Tom Tomorrow with world-class mockery of the term, popularizing it in left-o-world…
dww44
And they, the GOP, like to execute their crazy and acknowledge their foolhardiness under cover of bigger stories. Rachel did excellent work on this last night, but I have to say that the bill they passed 2 days ago to further restrict women’s access to abortions by depriving them of use of their own private health insurance monies unless they are able to approve sexual assault to the satisfaction of the IRS is just insane. I called my newly minted GOP rep (in 2009 he stood up in state legislature and ranted against their being a resolution congratulating Obama for winning the election), who of course has voted with the Republican majority. After all, only 2 GOPers didn’t vote with their fellow Repubs. T’wud be interesting to know who those 2 were.
And then, there’s Boehner and his GOP majority who won’t allow a resolution to commend those responsible for carrying out the Bin Laden mission. Says this House/Congress is all about substantive work and legislation.
Suffern ACE
@Villago Delenda Est:
B
I would be in favor of government subsidized hookers and blow for them. Keep them occupied so they don’t have time to fret about the contents of shopping bags of the lucky ducky poor. We’d all benefit and it probably wouldn’t cost that much.
single dad
Nobody likes paying taxes, but there’s an important distinction to be made. One the one hand, there’s “tax avoidance,” which is the strategy of reducing your tax bill as much as legally possible.
Hunter Gathers
@Omnes Omnibus: The price of hookers never goes down. You can either afford the 5 Diamond whores, or you can’t. If you can’t, someone else will pay the price for the Ashley Dupre’s of the world, while you have to suffer the indignity of a $20 handjob given in the front seat of your non-luxury car.
Georgia Pig
No shit. An irony of this nonsense is that, for a bunch of self-proclaimed capitalists, they sure don’t understand much about the nature of capital. I guess these guys never played checkers.
Comrade Javamanphil
Actual journalists weigh in
PeakVT
@Bob: McAddled will always drink the kool-aid. It’s her job.
Poopyman
@Hunter Gathers: Yeah, I was going to point out that the supply of hookers is “inelastic”, IIRC from my 1974 Econ class.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Javamanphil:
It is well known that the facts have a liberal bias.
Foxhunter
@Rosalita:
And they sure as hell better NOT have a cell phone or television.
jwb
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): My winger sources are willing to concede that OBL is dead, but they aren’t sure that it was at all a good idea to take him out.
Poopyman
Relatively on–topic: Voter fraud.
More Dems like this, please.
Foxhunter
@cleek:
Only if AQ is passin’ out photos. Do they have a facebook page or flickr account?
/snicker/
bkny
awesome … for all those christian pet owners in your circle worried about their kittehs/doggies left behind after the rapture:
http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/Home_Page.html
chopper
@Jim Pharo:
ruben bolling, actually, FTW. lucky ducky!
General Stuck
@jwb:
Obama didn’t just take out Osama, he took out exactly half of the wingnut political platform. So now the wingers are going to halve to double down on the other half and call elimination of all taxes, and defunding the military and CIA due to them defecting to democrats. Which of course leads straight into Libertarian Nirvana . It will be Ron Paul getting the GOP nom. You heard it here first.
Omnes Omnibus
@Poopyman: Maybe the supply of true pros is inelastic, but during bad times there is always an increase in semi-pros. Consider Germany immediately post-WWII and what nylon stockings or chocolate bars could do.
Montysano
@bkny:
That’s just fucking brilliant. I hope that every day their mailbox is full of checks from teh Rapture Ready set.
joeyess
A great quote from that wiki entry:
Yeah……. shove that in your ear, WSJ. Deep, deep, deep in your ear like an ice pick.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Villago Delenda Est: I once read a review of William Gibson that said that even if all of his books were to disappear, he would still be remembered for the term cyberspace. If Colbert does not have “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” put on his grave marker, someone will carve it in there for him.
Omnes Omnibus
@Montysano: It would be even funnier if whoever is running it is simply endorsing the checks over to a group like Planned Parenthood.
Dan
John, How did you snap out of it? How did the epiphany happen?
What would someone (say, my cousin, who I’d like to punch in the face) need to hear or realize to snap out of it?
danimal
@Comrade Javamanphil: Na na na na na…. I can’t hear you. Lalalalalalalalalal. Phzzzzt.
/winger (you determine the sanity)
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Dan: Sadly, like John here and Charles over at littlegreenfootballs, they have to figure it out on their own.
aimai
@Dan:
I hope John answers in person but IIRC it was something to do with the infolding craziness surrounding Schiavo.
aimai
Dennis SGMM
@Bullsmith:
This is one of the topics where the conservatives’ deliberate innumeracy comes into play. How many times have you heard one them state that “The wealthy already pay 50% of the taxes,”?
So, yeah, the wealthy pay their half so it’s up to you with your ill-gotten 20% of the wealth to pay the other half – you ungrateful fucks!
Cris (without an H)
@Jim Pharo:
Ruben Bolling, Tom The Dancing Bug. Lucky
Ducky!
soonergrunt
@LosGatosCA: fucking morons posting on blogs much?
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
Those great patriot Koch brothers are so in love with America and the American people that they’re intentionally spiking oil prices.
http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-business/contango-lesson-how-koch-industries-raises-gas-prices/12793
Will no one rid us of these troublesome billionaires?
joeyess
@Dan:
Most conservatives never do snap out of it. The ones that do, usually have a personal experience that opens their eyes to the injustice and then reticently move towards enlightenment. I’d hazard a guess that our illustrious blog-overlord is an exception to this rule. From what I’ve gleaned, Mr. Cole just saw Teh Crazy and stepped back in revulsion like finding a herd of slugs under a board in the backyard.
Of course, I’m guessing and I could be wildly wrong. It’s happened before.
Chris
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Well of course they’d say that if they were trying to get Obama reelected as part of their diabolical scheme to get Sharia Law imposed from the inside, hmm?
What? You don’t believe me? You liberal. You probably thought water fluoridation wasn’t a communist plot either!
danimal
You know what else is crazy? Threatening to shut down the government along with not voting to increase the debt ceiling and then say this:
joeyess
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
Did you see this bit about the illustrious Koch family?
soonergrunt
@bkny: That has to be a spoof. Or it’s a great con-job that I wish I’d thought of.
Cris (without an H)
@soonergrunt: Isn’t LosGatos saying the Clinton impeachment was an example of pre-Tea GOP insanity?
Comrade Dread
Back in 2002, when I was one of the lucky duckies, I would have gladly made the supreme sacrifice and traded my privileged status with any of the oppressed investment bankers burdened with millions of dollars and a increasingly smaller tax liability.
Chris
@Napoleon:
Yeah, I agree.
It’s also amazing how much they’ll let their guard down if you’re one of them, or they think you are. A significant part of what turned me off from conservatism was wandering into the Internets as an as-yet-not-politically-affiliated teenager, finding Bill Whittle’s blog, and listening to people explain to me that the robber barons were great and honest citizens and the real bad guys were the union thugs who were always trying to oppress them which is why the Pinkerton strike-breakers were really heroes…
Plenty of other crap like that too, but suffice it to say that if you’re a normal person and you’re reasonably well informed about what they’re discussing, nothing turns you off from conservatism like listening to conservatives.
As Reagan once said of communism, “A conservative is someone who watches Fox News. An anti-conservative is someone who understands Fox News.”
KevinNYC
Speaking of Kool-Aid, Monica Goodling who was in charge of mixing the Kool-Aid for the Bush Department of Justice has been reprimanded by the Virginia State Bar for her actions.
link
Comrade Javamanphil
@Villago Delenda Est: Some people say it is very uncivil of you to point this out.
Chris
@Muley Graves:
In their own minds, they’re John Galt. In real life, they’re Ayn Rand, mooching off of Social Security while pontificating against it, or Ayn Rand affiliated foundations, surviving from charity and donations from the rich.
Always thought someone should write some kind of sequel deconstructing Ayn Rand’s ideology by showing what would actually happen if the John Galts of society really went Galt. I suspect no one cares enough to do it, though, and I can’t say I blame them.
soonergrunt
@Cris (without an H): That’s why I wanted to hide/retract the comment. I made it in a flash and after I hit {submit} I realized that there was a very high probability that I was mistaken as to his/her meaning.
soonergrunt
@Chris: Behold, the sequel, Atlas Shrugged 2, One Hour Later as seen by Bob the Angry Flower.
soonergrunt
@soonergrunt: In any event, I was wrong to make that post, and I’m sorry. I hope LGCA didn’t see it.
Cris (without an H)
In my brother’s case, Sarah Palin’s voice.
Rick Taylor
It’s true the right wing has been crazy for a long time, but at the same time, it seems to me the craziness has been ramping up steadily. Perhaps its the increasing tension being wedded to a world view that is more and more dissonant with events. Having to defend the war in Iraq that turned out so badly after we learned that the original reasons given to justify it were lies may have made it worse. There was a big increase after the 2008 election, both because nominating governor Palin gave establishment approval of the craziness (even if the purpose was intended to exploit it), and Obama’s smart confident style has driven more people than just the Republicans crazy at times. Still, I doubt we’re anywhere near peak wingnut. The last Republican Presidential primary contest was a fiasco; the next one looks like it will be worse.
joeyess
@KevinNYC: The only question is, how far up will she fail?
bemused
Republicans don’t believe any unexpected calamity will ever happen to them forcing them to join the undeserving freeloaders. What boggles my mind is the republicans whose yearly wages range from barely above welfare to $50 thou or $60 thou a year who think that way. They are just one major illness or accident away from being totally wiped out but they seem to think they are immune. How do people get to adult age and still believe that?
ericblair
@Villago Delenda Est:
Christ, do I have to spell it out for you people. Obama faked Osama’s death, killed the Real Doctor who delivered baby Obama in Kenya and dumped *his* body into the drink, then flew Osama to Chicago where he’s now shacking up with Bill Ayers and planning the Kenyan Islamofascist Socialist Revolution in America. Al Qaeda put out a fake statement to get a bump in Obama’s poll numbers in the critical 79th week before the election.
Power struggle. Bah. Splitters.
Mike E
@Dan:
I picture John in a Rowdy Roddy Piper mullet, plaid shirt, wearin’ the special sunglasses, and getting physically ill after seeing what all those ‘hot’ Republican women actually looked like, just below the surface. His dog-ownership, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense!
Rihilism
@Dan: As one who has experienced this conversion, in my opinion, the epiphany comes to those who are, by nature, good people who desire to help others. One can argue with oneself that Republicans are trying to help people via a different methodology than the Democrats. Once you reach the conclusion that the Republicans have no intention or desire to help people other than the those least deserving of assistance, the need to rationalize the insanity becomes moot…
joeyess
@bemused:
Atlas Shrugged.
Not to mention this salient quote from John Steinbeck:
joeyess
goddamn boner filter.
Poopyman
@Chris:
It would be a short book. Sweet, but unpublishably short.
Just Some Fuckhead
We need to figure out how to bottle this magic.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
With each investigation of our country’s history, I have concluded that the crazy has been with us since the beginning. Its always been this way.
Mandramas
Yeah, peak wingnut is like the great Tulip craze of 1637.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Poopyman: I’m pretty sure the description of the people turning on each other to eat could be made into a long story. There was an entire movie about these people a guy trapped in a cave so that he could watch them.
LongHairedWeirdo
For the record, I *do* agree that not having people pay income tax is a problem, *but* I’d like to see that fixed by people earning enough money that they *can*.
What I do find hilarious, though, is the idea that taxes were *finally* cut so much that they were virtually non-existent, and what did it do? It pissed people off. Which shows that it was never about taxes, so much as it was about having a wedge issue.
It’s funny that the Republicans pretend to be the party of grownups, while insisting that everyone gets to have dessert instead of that icky spinach, and gets to stay up all night on a school night, and gets to build big a big, big, *BIG*
model train setmilitary-industrial complex, and that it’s okay to punch the unpopular kids and then laugh about it.ericblair
@joeyess:
Moderation, it’s what’s for breakfast, apparently.
Marmot
@Rick Taylor:
I respectfully disagree. Remember the Birchers, with their Alaska “reeducation camp” and fluoridation looniness? The 1994 values crap, like shunning unwed mothers from polite society and cutting funding for PBS? And the non-stop get-Clinton campaign that ran from expensive haircuts stopping tarmac traffic at the airport, to Whitewater bull, to drug-running bull, to murdering Vince Foster? Then for some reason it became important to invade Iraq.
It’s not the craziness per se. I’m not old enough to know for sure, but it seems to me that there’s more mainstreaming of the crazy since the Internets and Fox News. I’m led to believe that society as a whole was barely aware of the Birchers. Anyone?
Dan
@Cris (without an H): Yeah, but this same cousin has the entire Palin library.
His Amazon account must say “You may also like My Pet Goat and anything by James Patterson”.
zach
In 2008 John McCain ran an ad saying that half of Americans pay no taxes: “$100-billion to those that pay no taxes.”
For some reason, Obama didn’t jump on it at the time. Imagine an ad that started: “John McCain thinks that half of Americans don’t pay taxes, what do you think?” And then goes on with man-on-the-street interviews with folks holding up pay checks and pointing at withholdings, seniors pointing out that they pay tax on Social Security benefits, etc.
One of the Republican candidates (or a debate moderator) is going to make this point in one of the GOP debates and everyone on stage will nod and say “of course we need to broaden the tax base!” Hopefully they won’t get away with it this time because the GOP’s fantasy that income tax (let alone all tax) is super progressive is a huge liability.
Omnes Omnibus
@Marmot: As a kid, I remember looking through my dad’s 1960s car magazines and seeing mocking references to the John Birch Society in both Road & Track and Car & Driver. Anecdotal, sure; nevertheless, true.
cleek
@Dan:
JC has said the last straw was the Schiavo affair:
ChrisNYC
I was never a GOPer but I did, pre Bush II, think they were not completely revolting and dangerous. The turn for me came when they did the operational side of Iraq so recklessly and *directly* caused the death of so many service people.
Throwing away the State Dept plans for water, elec, etc. Letting the riots turn into generalized crime and into the insurgency. Bremer’s absolutely criminal disbanding of the Army.
In the run up to the war, I thought a backstop would be that they would in fact do what they needed to to protect the US mil on the ground. I really was shocked when it became clear that they were happy to just throw those people away.
I want to see both Bremer and Rumsfeld sob and beg forgiveness. LBJ at least had the decency to let Vietnam kill him.
Mandramas
McCarthyism sounds like a right-wing craze, right?
Omnes Omnibus
@ChrisNYC: But Bremer wore Timberland boots with his suit and Rumsfeld worked at a standing desk like many Victorians. Don’t you see that?
Brachiator
This is why I hate these WSJ muthafuckers with a passion.
Let’s see: Corporations and wealthy individuals who pay little or no taxes are the Deity’s gift to capitalism. Workers who pay little or no taxes are craven, selfish parasites sucking the life out of the nation.
They cherry pick their goddam facts and then whine if anybody points out the volleys they’ve fired in the war on the middle class.
First of all, some of these supposed tax breaks clammored for by the masses were actually championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which just loves all kinds of extra tax benefits heaped on (hetero) married couples with children, especially if the wife does not work.
Also, too, businesses and wealthy individuals make maximum use of all kinds of tax breaks that not only can reduce their tax to zero, but also allow them to take more of your tax money to subsidize their credits.
Of course, the WSJ would defend all business credits and deductions as only right, proper and necessary, neatly avoiding the contradiction of a “free market” that needs tax subsidies in order to operate at peak efficiency.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandramas: McCarthyism.
Napoleon
@Chris:
Exactly – Just keep them talking and do not say anything which gives them any clue you are not on board and sooner or later the crazy comes out. The right lying about what they want to do and why they are doing it is hardwired into the DNA of even your local wingnuts. If they think you are not with them they don’t let you see the sociopathic underpinnings of why they beleive what they believe but instead come up with some alternative explaination for why taxes need to be cut (job growth!) and welfare gutted (young bucks with t-bones).
Marmot
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s pretty cool. I’ll see if I can find some next time I’m at the library. There’s always some Bircher issue that comes back up in the Repub party. You’re talking articles, right? Not ads?
Omnes Omnibus
@Marmot: Yeah, it would be a passing, satirical reference. As a kid I wasn’t aware of the JBS but I definitely got the association of the group with backwardness and paranoia. Interestingly, there were often positive references and associations with the Great Society as well. Examples, I guess, of the postwar liberal consensus.
Marmot
@ChrisNYC:
Goddamn. Occasionally I forget about that part. Then I remember or I’m reminded and I get more misanthropic still, wondering how anyone could possibly vote Repub, much less 50% of the country. They just couldn’t help themselves–they needed to kick Teh Enemy in the balls when he’s down. Never mind international law or freaking common sense.
Edit: Blockquote fixt. Also, didn’t mean to hate on ya. Glad you’re not Repub any more.
rea
When I die, my obituary will doubtless include:
“Commentor in thread where VanderLoon announced that he was aware of all internet traditions.”
Kathy in St. Louis
What luck. Not only are you so lucky you don’t have to pay taxes, you don’t have to worry about increasing gas prices because you have no car. You don’t have to worry about increased medical expenses because you can’t afford to see a doctor anyway. You don’t have to worry about the high cost of food, just whether people are contributing enough to your local food bank so that you can make it though the month.
These guys make Scrooge look like a social worker.
Kirk Spencer
If you’re going to talk Birchers, you really need to listen to Dylan’s Blues. Specifically, his 1962 Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues. (Banned from the Ed Sullivan Show, even.)
slag
@Dan: I hope John answers too, but from what I’ve observed, there are three prerequisites to snapping out of it: self-awareness, empathy for those outside your group, and the ability to admit you’ve made a mistake. No right-winger I’ve ever met (including family members) has all of these prerequisites. Quite a few of them have none of those prerequisites.
Mandramas
@Omnes Omnibus: Hi, Omnes. Would you like to clarify what are meaning with the link? It was instructive, indeed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandramas: You seemed to be asking what McCarthyism was. I just wanted to give you something to read about it.
Origuy
I remember ads the Birchers placed in the Bloomington, IN newspaper when I was a kid. They were paste-up jobs with lots of handwritten remarks about fluoridation and the UN. Even then, I could see that they were wacked out.
Mandramas
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh. I missed /irony markers again. I was trying to say “right wing craze was present since 1950s at least”. Thanks!
Cheryl from Maryland
@Hunter Gathers: This. The Kaplan Fish Wrap did it again yesterday — they counted payroll taxes for general revenue spending, and they counted SS as a government expenditure, but they did not count payroll taxes when showing how people are taxed. Cue Mark Twain and statistics meme.
Captain C
If I had been the boss at the WSJ back then, I would have called in the authors of the “lucky duckies” piece to my office, told them that they had done a great job, that they were carrying on the proud editorial traditions of the Journal in fine fashion, and that their article was so convincing that I was cutting all their salaries down to $12K, effective immediately, so that they, too, could be “lucky duckies.”
JoJo
@Chris:
I think this cartoon pretty much sums is up:
http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
JoJo
@Chris:
I think this cartoon pretty much sums is up:
http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
Rick Taylor
I would agree with you, the crazy has always been there, and the change has been it’s been steadily mainstreamed, and more reasonable conservatives have been marginalized.
Tom Q
I agree, the craziness has always been there, but it used to be you only heard it on obscure radio stations late Sunday night. Now it’s coming out of the mouths of Senators.
Maybe it’s this (and I can say this, because I’m almost 60 myself): The GOP base is getting older, approaching that age when the self-censoring instinct weakens. Just like an old married couple might find themselves exchanging vicious barbs they never would have when they were young, the aging Pubs are letting their ids fly and they’re powerless to stop the hidden feelings pouring out.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@cleek: One and the same…
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@Tom Q: You know that you just delivered verbatim the pitch producers delivered to CBS for TV series, “Shit My Dad Says”? (Based on the exciting blog of the same name.)
trollhattan
@soonergrunt:
TOTALLY understandable. You can be a luckie duckie in Los Gatos while earning $80k. Looters!
http://www.city-data.com/city/Los-Gatos-California.html
I’ll bet ninty percent of Los Gatos city workers commute at least an hour.
maus
@Jim Pharo: Oh my gosh yes, those cartoons are brutally funny.
Comrade Carter
Then again, your web space has become infinitely more readable. So, the change has been good.
Cerberus
@Hunter Gathers:
Let’s not forget that many poor STILL PAY INCOME TAX.
Just because you get a rebate for part of what was deducted from your pay check doesn’t mean you “paid no income tax”.
Sure there are some who get “full refunds” of their money, because they make less than poverty wages and if you want that to stop you can start paying the poor a goddamn living wage.
Fuck, I don’t know anyone in my age group who wasn’t fucking ecstatic the first time they had to pay additional taxes in April because it meant they were earning enough money to be at least slightly out of poverty.
It is mindboggling how moronic people become about taxes and convinces me thoroughly that there would be zero harrumphing of tax issues if it was all just automatically deducted out of sight.
Cerberus
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Yup.
And if you scratch the surface, you can see exactly what it is that’s really bothering them:
Blacks at all being enriched with any money a white man has.
They can’t stand the idea that black people might possibly benefit in any way by the system they have so carefully stacked against them and complaining about “taxes being too high” was a great dogwhistle to do that with (welfare queens in cadillacs, young bucks, t-bone steaks, keep more of your money instead of it going to “waste”).
Poor equals black and poor not paying their way is just the new “shifty, lazy n***ers”. That’s why no matter how impoverished a white family is, they still think of themselves as “lower-middle-class”.
And it’s why the big racist backlash against Obama chose “high tax rates” as the banner they were hiding behind to basically call him “near” over and over again.
And it’s why the alliance between money and racists is so strong. The racists get a dogwhistle that sounds crazy to criticize on racial lines (it’s so obviously about class, after all) and the rich get to gut the country like a fish (racists are very stupid).
This is why the complaints get louder the lower taxes go and why the people who claim to be so obsessed about their “tax burden” never seem to notice when it goes down. Same deal with why “pro-lifers” never seem to know any real facts about Planned Parenthood and seem to be unaware of what methods lower the abortion rate (because it’s about punishing women who have sex, rather than anything to do with “babiezz”).
Cerberus
@Napoleon:
True with most bigots really.
Look white and have a friendly chat in all white company with someone who seems nice usually but occasionally goes off-color, and you’ll get a full-on whiff of some racist conspiracy theory.
And I ran into situations all the time when I thought I was a guy where someone would admit the most heinous sexist actions (rape usually) because “we’re all guys here”.
When the bigot (or conservative, but really, is there any difference), thinks they are in like company, they tend to let the freak flag fly and reveal a dark underbelly that makes you want to wash yourself for a week.
Cerberus
@slag:
I would agree with that.
And of the three, the last one, ability to admit mistake, tends to be the bar that few dare cross. Too many people have centered their egos view of their own intelligence and likelihood of survival in a capitalist system (ability to be a straight-shooter who can see through scams) on their inability to ever be wrong.
So admitting fault in one aspect means admitting you are a complete moron or wrong about everything and the desire to protect the ego leads one down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and insanity.
I think a lot of it stems from Fundamentalism and how it teaches the Bible as something inerrant and thus any admission of flaw or contradiction would destroy the whole book. And also how it teaches the importance of purity as something that can be ruined by a “single dot of black, that dilutes and destroys all the white” (actual quote related by ex-fundie and fundie friends).
It gets people applying the same standards to themselves.
If I’m ever wrong once, then I could always be wrong so better to make mistakes with confidence and defend them as not mistakes then correct it as you go.
People may be more familiar with this from the 2004 election, where Bush denying all his fuck-ups was “moral clarity” and John Kerry changing his mind with more information was him being a “flip-flopper”.
Because of this tendency, there are a number of people who will support wrong but confident over right, but open because the former resonates more with how they stumble through life.
It’s also why reality has a liberal bias. Academics, science, and most methods of assessing reality have at their core a willingness to follow the evidence to what conclusions it provides. If a wealth of evidence changes a previous assumption, then one must acknowledge it.
But if your whole ego and sense of self is wrapped in that wrong assumption, you will fight to the death against reality to try and make it take it back.
Howlin Wolfe
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): As somebody has probably already pointed out to you, Bel, that the fact that al Qaeda says so is central to the whingers’ point.
No one of Importance
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
But but…what if they’re playing 11 dimensional chess and they only *want* you to think he’s dead, hmmm? So he can come back in a new incarnation?
Like bin Laden wouldn’t stoop to being his own sock puppet.
No one of Importance
@ericblair:
You’ve been taking dictation from Pam Geller again, haven’t you, Mr Orwell?
No one of Importance
@Dan:
Did you try punching him in the face? I mean, corrective violence is always an option with the rigidly stupid.
Robin
GE = lucky duckies