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WMDs and Taxes
Two things that are NOT certain in life, it seems
During the months in which the White House propaganda machine was ramping up for an attack on Iraq, I figured there had to be some truth to the US claims that Saddam had illegal weapons.
Aside from the fact that Saddam was a sleazy, murderous SOB who was surrounded by enemies largely of his own creation, and the fact that he wasn’t a moron, I figured he kept some handy just in case Israel, Iran, or Imerica got any funny ideas about coming in and taking Iraq’s oil. And of course, there’s the pervasive American notion that the only way to deal with others is by being armed to the teeth. He would keep weapons on hand for the same reason we keep some 12,000 nuclear warheads handy; Botswana might attack at any moment. Saddam shares that type of cringing paranoia with America’s worst.
Then, too, there was the fact that the UN hadn’t accounted for all the weapons he was purported to have.
Finally, Putsch and Blair seemed pretty sure that he had those weapons. Colin Powell, former respected military figure, went before the UN and, using graphs and charts and 24 8 by 10 color glossies, swore up and down Saddam had those weapons. Putsch, during his state of the union address, named specific quantities that Saddam was supposed to have. Her majesty’s government even went so far as to plagiarize a white paper on the subject. I assumed that a) Putsch and Blair probably knew what they were talking about, since a lot of those weapons were originally provided to Saddam by Donald Rumsfeld back in the days of the Reagan administration and 2) they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to just make it up.
So even though I didn’t believe Saddam had nukes, and I didn’t believe he was a threat, imminent or otherwise, to any other nation, I did assume he had weapons that under the UN resolution, he wasn’t supposed to have.
I don’t know which is more embarrassing: the fact that the weapons, by all available evidence, never existed, making our murder of thousands of people an action based on a lie, or the repeated efforts by these pathetic fools in the White House, State, and the Pentagon to wishful-think the WMDs into existence by repeatedly releasing breathless news stories claiming that they had been found. Trailers here, aluminum tubes there, lab flasks in this place, vacuum cleaners in that place! Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh, My! The latest example was the incredible spectacle of Putsch, pretending to be the American President, standing tall and stating to the world media yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had been found. That, of course, was a lie. Phony Blair, the Neville Chamberlain of 21st century England, declared that he had “secret proof” of the existence of these weapons. He really, really, really wanted to tell us, you see, but if he told us, then he would have to kill us.
Blair’s role in the international arena these days seems to be that of distracting people from noticing what a dumb asshole Putsch is by being an even dumber asshole himself.
The weapons aren’t there. They don’t exist. Perhaps they never existed. We killed thousands, we maimed tens of thousands, including a whole shitload of children, and we destroyed an ancient nation, and our stated reason for doing so was a lie.
Stand tall, Republicans. Waggle your little flags and tell us how morally superior you are because you don’t give a shit that the murders were based on a lie, and invent fairy tales about how you wanted to save the poor Iraqi people from Saddam. It won’t help. Try telling us that Jesus thinks Putsch attacking Iraq based on a lie was terrific. Go ahead. I dare you.
Still, Phony Blair (or, as he’s known here in America, “Sancho Panza”) demonstrated a political policy of this administration. If you get caught doing something really stupid, do something even dumber, so as to disperse the attention.
Case in point. The tax cut. Putsch was using another policy; establish a game plan through attractive lies. So he sold his tax scheme exactly the same way he sold the last one; it was good for the economy, it would help working Americans, and it would put your money back in your pocket. That the last one did none of these things seems to have been lost on just about everyone.
The point Putsch really pushed home on this latest effort to destroy America was that no taxpayer would be left behind. They made a big production of how the child tax credit, increased by $600 per child, would result in an immediate reduction of payroll taxes for those who needed tax relief the most; the working poor.
It was a siren call few politicians can resist. The tax scam passed Congress, and those politicians responsible enough to worry about the fact that it was closer to anywhere from $800 billion to $1.5 trillion instead of the advertised $350 billion consoled themselves by saying that at least the working stiffs caught a break.
Except they didn’t. A last minute amendment made heads of households making between $11,000 and $26,000 a year ineligible for the tax credit. That’s some 8.1 million households affected. That’s some 25 million Americans that George just cheated and lied to.
The right wing spin machine, which had already promoted the ludicrous notion that the problem with the missing weapons of mass destruction wasn’t that they were missing, but that people who hated America and the President were showing the meanness of spirit to ask where those weapons where. (The inimitable Molly Ivins had a field day with that one in this week’s column!) Fresh off that exercise in Goebbelean logic, they proceeded to explain that the households exempt from the tax credit weren’t being cheated because they didn’t pay any taxes anyway.
For those folks, many of whom see a bigger percentage of their payroll check taken by the government than the typical billionaire pays, that is a real slap in the face.
Republicans have this lunatic notion that poor people are well off because they don’t have much of a tax burden. Oddly enough, you never see rich republicans quitting their jobs and taking up rewarding part-time minimum wage careers so they, too, can be freed of the tax burden. I e-maiiled the Wall Street Journal shortly after they referred to the working poor as “lucky duckies,” (no, really) suggesting they all do that. The note must have gotten lost in the system; I didn’t get a reply.
So distract from the rape of Iraq by raping the working poor instead.
What a regime. Deflect attention from atrocities by committing other atrocities.
Just when you think they possibly couldn’t sink any lower, the free fall resumes.
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