Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:48 pm
A lot of people took away many different things from the first Democratic debate. A lot of people. Unfortunately, only some of them were paying attention, not including our Republican friends. What Democrats saw was their presidential hopefuls tell us what they were for, and what they were against.
For example, let’s save the environment for our children. Let’s close private prisons. Let’s de-militarize the police. Let’s regulate Wall Street so we can avoid a repeat of the GOP’s 2008 “good old days.” Let’s address gun violence. Let’s save Social Security. You know, real issues. Issues Americans care about.
Republicans? You’d think the Democratic debate was advertising for some sort of fire sale.
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They freaked out at Fox News’ Fox & Friends yesterday, where Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her friends typically failed to understand a single thing said (not that they wouldn’t have just invented a whole bunch of stuff even if they had).
According to Hasselbeck, Doocey, Kilmeade and their guest Stuart Varney, the Democratic candidates just promised a whole bunch of free stuff to people who will vote for them (Who knew educating our children was a “freebie”?) They even made some flashy graphics to show what tax payers can be expected to pay for (you know, as opposed to wars, or giving billions to oil companies, or National Parks to the Koch Brothers, or sacred Native American land to foreign mining companies, or a wall to keep Mexicans out…):
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
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STEVE DOOCY (HOST): Ok, so with all that free stuff they’re giving away, what’s it going to cost you, the American taxpayer?
STUART VARNEY: A lot.
DOOCY: Stuart Varney joins us live. You’re right, a lot. How lot? Big lot.
VARNEY: Look, if you go with the Wall Street Journal, they say that Bernie Sanders‘ program costs $18 trillion over 10 years. Having listened to Hillary last night, I mean she’s somewhere up there with all the freebies that she’s going to give away. So this is going to cost an arm and a leg. They want to tax the rich, tax Wall Street, tax the big corporations, topple the 1 percent.
BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): And give us what?
VARNEY: And give us freebies.
ELISABETH HASSELBECK (HOST): A long list. Public college, paid family leave, health care, health care for all children, prescription drugs, expanded Social Security, childhood education, higher minimum wage. It goes on and on. You can’t even fill the screen with it here. I think everyone who’s a good person, has an ounce of mercy in them would say “we’d love to be able to do this.” The problem is, it ends up coming back to bite us if we can’t afford it. Is that right?
VARNEY: Absolutely. If you do all of that, all of the above, all of those freebies that you just mentioned, they’re going to pay for it by taxing the rich. If do you that, if you take all that money off the rich, you end up with a recession, if not a depression.
HASSELBECK: And who does that hurt?
VARNEY: That hurts everybody. There’s far fewer jobs and less tax revenue coming in. So you’ve got an even bigger deficit and even more money to borrow.
KILMEADE: The one person who was targeted or the one group of people that were targeted all night was Wall Street. They talked about the collapse of 2008. Something is telling them that people aren’t over that and they’re probably right. And they also were saying that the middle class are getting screwed by the millionaires and billionaires. In fact, Bernie Sanders is running against billionaires, the 500 in our country, the ones that are really burning Bernie.
VARNEY: Yeah, look, they are giving stuff away. They’re giving stuff away. In fact, I keep going back to this. They’re buying votes. “Vote for me and look what I will give you.”
As opposed to the Republican system of saying “Vote for me and look what I will take away from other people.”
There is no pretense at Fox & Friends of actual journalism; You have to especially love how “tax the 1 percent” turns, for these clowns, into “topple” the 1 percent. Sorry Varney, nobody at the debate was selling the French Revolution.
The difference between the Democratic debate, where actual policy was discussed, and the Republican, where fake facts and insults were thrown about with the sole purpose of making white people hate everybody else, was that between night and day, and the concept of actually addressing the facts of our daily existence really seems to throw conservatives.
Living in the Fox News reality bubble 24/7, doing the sort of math Republicans do to make themselves feel better, leaves them with no context.
Republicans love spending money. They will throw your tax dollars at their rich friends like there is no tomorrow. Gods forbid a single penny of it gets spent on making life better for the average American. Then suddenly its freebies. The average American, I am sorry to say, doesn’t know what freebies are, because we’re not oil companies or billionaires or defense contractors.
All we want is roads, and bridges that do not fall down, safe air to breath, food to eat, and water to drink. We want education and opportunities and we want them equally for all. I don’t think that’s too much to ask when you put it against the desire to spend trillions murdering people in other countries, and here, on our own streets.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
