Rejoinders

If it's coming out of Tucker Bounds's mouth, it's a lie:

"John McCain repeatedly pointed to Sen. Obama's vote in favor of higher taxes on families making just $42,000 a year, and his proposal for $860 billion in lavish new government spending which is a crushing burden on middle class families and the Main Street economy," spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement Saturday.

He might possibly slip and tell the truth by accident, but he'd never repeat the truth. The Republican message machine is about repetition, not about accuracy. Using the well-honed techniques of advertising and tobacco industry denial, they judge their attack lines only be effectiveness, not by something so retro and hoary as being true.

So, when Obama attacks McCain's middle class cred, they don't merely parry. They counter. Like Feyd-Rautha, with poison on the blade.

Democrats are really poor at this. They parry with a sound reasoned argument and think they've won. Innocents!

Every time Tucker Bounds or another of the professional liars who speak for Republicans says something like what's above, Democrats at least must counterattack against the credibility of the whole Republican message, something along these lines:

Tucker repeats yet again a proven lie about Obama's tax plan, which raises taxes on people making more than $200,000 a year. What he and the Republicans will never tell you is that the one person making $42,000 who'll see a tax increase is a teenager with a BMW whose trust fund billionaire daddy is trying to use to launder his capital gains. Republicans will never tell you the whole truth about this. Can you trust them about anything else?

Democrats should have been explicitly attacking the core credibility of Republicans for thirty years. The Republican Party message is founded on three true things:

• lower taxes for the wealthy
• gun rights
• personal responsibility for non-wealthy knocked-up women and girls

Even the last is close to a lie. Republicans would really rather retain Roe v. Wade as a perpetual burr under the fundie saddle. That's why they've moved so slowly to actually overturn it. Keeping that burr in place is why they have started to push even more extreme views that would prohibit most forms of birth control.

The rest of the Republican platform requires consistent deception of the voters, especially the part about tax cuts for the middle class that consist entirely of leftovers from the tables of the wealthy. That's why Tucky and his ilk prosper and the rest of us don't.