Socialism Rampant!....The Great Lie Continues

By Lee Russ

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 08:21 PM

A major plank in the Republicans' organized resistance to common sense solutions to the current economic disaster is the claim that raising income taxes on the richest Americans in order to support programs to improve the lot of poorer Americans is such a "redistribution of wealth" that it is Socialism. Or Communism! Or both. And Fascism, to boot!

Those are dandy little labels which have been so diligently demonized that the mere use of the words is supposed to send Americans screaming toward the right for protection from the bogeyman. And part of the conditioning is that the labels should scare you so deeply and immediately that you don't even stop to consider what the labels actually mean, and, most of all, whether it makes any sense to use those labels as the Republicans are using them.

So....you get the usual suspects--Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Chuck Grassley, Eric Cantor, and a ton of others--repeating again and again that Obama's budget and Obama's beliefs are Socialist in large part because he wants to increase tax rates on the wealthy and on capital gains. Sacrilege, according to our Republican/right wing chorus, the first step toward Socialism, a punishment of the successful in order to reward "the losers."

And, according to the Canadian Press:

President Barack Obama's plans are "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment," says one top Republican. He's "the world's best salesman of socialism," says another.

"Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," declares Mike Huckabee, one-time Republican presidential candidate.

Fox News personality Sean Hannity derides his agenda as "socialism you can believe in," while his colleague in cacophonous conservative punditry, Rush Limbaugh, is unapologetic about publicly declaring his desire for Obama to fail: "Why would I want socialism to succeed?"

I'm willing to bet that these bleating boobs neither know nor care that they are, by implication, accusing several Republican Presidents and many, many US congresses of Socialism. If having higher marginal tax rates than we now have is a sure sign of Socialism, then the US was one hell of a committed Socialistic country during the entire time period of 1932 to 1986, during which our highest tax rate exceeded the current highest tax rate every single year as I've pointed out several times here on WTW and several more in other contexts. Every single year. Under Eisenhower. Under Nixon. Under Ford.

According to these boobs, we were committed Socialists during the entire time that we were at war, both hot and cold, with communism. The entire time.

According to figures compiled by the American Taxpayer's Union, hardly a left wing source, the top rate during Eisenhower's two terms was never lower than 90%. During Nixon's time, it was never below 70%.

When is a crock of shit not a crock of shit? When the media presents it as a reasonable claim. When the populace is too ignorant of history to know that the crock has a distinctive odor. When the opposition for some reason that escapes me declines to be as insistent in it's rebuttal as the liars are in their "buttal."

And I haven't even started on the whole idea of what tax rates have historically been during times of war. Remember that Republican/right wing claim that the war on terror was the 21st century's first great war? Remember that we're still fighting that "great war" in two foreign countries? Remember that the current top tax rate is less than half of what it was during all the "great wars" of the 20th century?

Dear Beck O'Reilimbaughnitty:

Could you please dredge up an ounce or two of conscience, ethics, and truth? Just for a change of pace?