The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Both parties are lying to you
The government’s services keep getting worse.
Even their lies.
The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had proscribed weapons.
Sure, they were lies. But they were plausible lies. Theoretically, bin Laden might have snuck into Afghanistan. Saddam might have acquired WMDS. Those things could have been true.
Now they’re giving us implausible lies. Not only are their lies, well, lies — they say things that are untrue and can’t possibly be true and that no one, no matter how stupid or uninformed, could believe.
Democrats go on and on about how nothing is more important than defeating Trump. Democracy itself hangs in the balance! After Trump redux, the re-deluge. Like Hitler, but worse.
But they don’t really believe
that. If liberals really actually thought Trump was going to suspend the Constitution and send his enemies — them — to camps, their sense of survival would have prompted them to select the most charismatic, brilliant, popular, vigorous, 2024 Democratic presidential nominee possible. Instead, they gave us Biden.
You can’t think Trump is dangerous and go with Biden-harris. For Democrats, protecting
their party’s corporatist status quo matters more than Trump’s purported threat to democracy. That’s the truth. We all know.
Republicans won’t shut up about out-of-control deficit spending and the $34 trillion national debt which, according to them, will tank the economy because, like a family that has to live within its means except for credit cards and student loans and car loans and home mortgages, the government can’t keep spending cash it doesn’t have even though it owns the U.S. Mint and has gotten away with it for, like, a century.
We know that the fake deficit hawks don’t actually believe what they are saying in real time, as they’re saying it, because while they’re threatening to shut down the government every few months, they keep throwing even more billions of dollars at the Defense Department than the DOD even asks for, so much that the military sucks up more than everything else the government does combined, and that’s not including the wars they put “off the books” and the proxy wars and the wars they charge to the State Department, not to mention debt service on old wars.
These diametrically opposed lines of rhetoric represent a dramatic shift away from old-fashioned political hypocrisy. If the military is your biggest expense by far and you keep raising it, and you claim to worry about spending, you are lying. No amount of cognitive dissonance can convince us otherwise. You know we know it’s crap, yet you keep right on going.
“Normal” communication by political elites has become