p m carpenter’s commentary: The last Red Scare
Portions of President Obama’s unintentionally public remarks at a private Chicago fundraiser this week received boundless media exposure, especially those about Paul Ryan’s towering hypocrisy and the GOP’s downright goofy attempt to unfund the healthcare act, with the president’s permission.
Yet Obama uttered another line of far superior insight and penetrating truth, whose media underplay was distressing, but not atypical:
This will be the strategy going forward, trying to do things they can’t do legislatively under the cause of “cutting spending.”
Bingo. In one sentence — all the GOP’s customary diversionism and demagoguery and underhandedness and ideological corruption. Just another Red Scare, only this time about ink.
The very people who spent 30 years driving deficits and the debt to historically alarming levels are now genuine budget hawks extraordinaire, uber alles, in toto. And anyone who believes that is, well, I guess gullible enough to vote Republican. Even their own bloody budget passed yesterday in the House does virtually nothing about resolving deficits for years and years and years.
It’s a scam; a shrieking, terror-inducing, intent-diverting hoax designed, simply, to dismantle the New Deal and essentially all of 20th-century liberalism. The bogeyman of the right’s imaginary America — white yeoman farmers, straight enterprising artisans, fearless entrepreneurs, submissive women and happy Sambos and deported Spics — isn’t deficits: it’s 21st-century civilization, which is as liveable as it is because of 20th-century human decency.
And right wingers can’t stand it. They’ve not been able to since 1933. And now, they know, is their last chance to gut decency-through-government by bamboozling and terrifying the body politic about deficits.
). Go to our 
minus the fringe, the wife had a pair of pajamas looked like that.
till I threw them out.
Ronald Reagan is dead and should stay that way.