More vacuous 'even-handedness'

Politico's David Rogers pens an absolutely gut-wrenching piece on the moral sewer of the GOP House Budget Committee's "final touches":

Monthly food stamp benefits would be cut, hitting millions of single-mother households by summer’s end. Unemployed workers would be dropped from the rolls until they spend down their cash savings below $2,000.... Working-class, often Latino, parents would be denied child tax credit refunds if they lack Social Security cards proving they are authorized to work in the U.S.

These are immigrant taxpayers whose average annual wages are $21,240 and generate far more for the Social Security system in payroll taxes than any refunds they receive.... [T]he House channels an almost identical sum, $7.35 billion, into a new tax deduction for 125,000 small-business owners whose income exceeds $1 million....

[T]he real House focus is on protecting the Pentagon. Measured against the post-sequester path set out last August, there would be a massive 13 percent, $62 billion shift of resources to defense under Ryan’s plan.

After decades of double-troubled and toiling insurgency, such is the ideological culmination of the GOP's rabidly anti-New Deal, profoundly unChristian, altogether consensus-shattering squalidness. Extremism, once set in motion, comprehends no ethical boundaries--it feeds on its own self-righteousness; and because it similarly looks only inward, what it sees just happens to always be in wholesale agreement with itself. The result, inevitably, are self-intensifying gangs of Robespierres or Bolsheviks or Brownshirts.

You want to call that shrill? Frankly, I don't give a damn.

This, however, also from Rogers, is what I'd call asinine, mixed with a touch of the proposterous and topped by a dollop of the aggressively insulting and Beltway-ingratiating:

By failing to engage more with solutions of their own, Obama and Democrats can blame only themselves for creating this political void.

What the GOP House is attempting is scarcely the product of a political void. It is, rather, the desperate, final stage of an orchestrated, carefully concerted and highly weaponized assault on decades of social and economic progress which characterized the liberal triumph of "The American Century"--in ways the far right, of course, viscerally detested and never forgave.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

Does anyone know the growth of "defense spending' since 2000 in current dollars? i would include intelligence and security agencies in that pot. i realize much of this is hidden in areas outside the DOD.

[Susan Zoon]

There is no pole long enough to touch the bottom of this swamp.

[Janicket]

Susan, you have perfectly caught it.