Paul Krugman lists a set of lies of that the president has said (and will likely repeat in tomorrow's debate) about his record and about Senator Kerry's proposals. Read this column and know these facts. Given that the first political organization I ever paid dues to was the Concord Coalition it's no surprise that I am especially revolted by the president's claims that he's been a fiscally responsible leader who's shrinking government, and that his budget deficits are the fault of international events rather than his own policies (those are HUGE lies). But the president's record and claims are equally detached from reality when it comes to the nature of his tax policies and the number of private-sector jobs that have vanished during his presidency.
Posted by armand at October 12, 2004 11:27 AM | TrackBack | Posted to PoliticsKrugman writes, in enumerating the putative "lies" we can anticipate hearing tomorrow:
The tax cutsMr. Bush will claim that Senator John Kerry opposed "middle class" tax cuts. But budget office numbers show that most of Mr. Bush's tax cuts went to the best-off 10 percent of families, and more than a third went to the top 1 percent, whose average income is more than $1 million.
This annoys me principally because it fails to point out a lie, and thus is vulnerable to criticism from the other side as representative of the bias of left-wing columnists. The fact is, Bush did cut middle-class tax cuts. That doesn't make the cuts responsible, or proportional, or fair, or conducive to an economic recovery of any robustness or duration. But it's not a lie.
And as for whether Kerry voted against tax cuts, this illustrates another offensive tendency on the right, and alludes to a tactic that seriously comprises like 60% of Bush's stump speeches. Just because Kerry votes against a particular proposal to change or fund, e.g., Social Security, the war in Iraq, tax cuts, and so on, hardly makes him against the very idea of those things. I wish Kerry would just come out and point out this fallacy; it's infuriating to watch it be repeated ad nauseum on the stump, in the press, and at the debates without the very simply response it cries out for: that much of the votes in question, to the extent they're not wholly mischaracterized to begin with, were easily understandable as resistant to the pork that has become such a hallmark of this Republican Congress.