There's got to be a better way.
The new Republican [House] rules will gut pay-as-you-go because they require offsets only for entitlement increases, not for tax cuts. In effect, the new rules will codify the Republican fantasy that tax cuts do not deepen the deficit.
It gets worse. The new rules mandate that entitlement-spending increases be offset by spending cuts only — and actually bar the House from raising taxes to pay for such spending.
That's from this morning's NY Times' editorial titled "Deficit Hypocrisy," which fumes and fulminates from its opening crack of indignation to its last gasp of disgust about the GOP's "warped mind-set"; it wallows furiously in Republicans' mad fiscal indulgences, it protests the wretched indecency of bad math and superb demagoguery.
Which is what the NY Times editorial board, most of its columnists, about half of the cable news industry, all of what passes for liberal radio and the entirety of the progressive blogosphere have been doing for years ... and years. Fulminating. And fuming. And protesting -- to evidently little effect, since here we are, again, not at all far in time from twelve years of almost laughably grotesque GOP Congressional rule and eight years of this country's worst, most profligate president ever.
In short, somebody ain't gettin' the message; indeed, a whole lot of somebodies -- in fact, statistically speaking, most of the somebodies out there, since most everyone doesn't read the NY Times, listen to cable news or liberal radio or even glance at progressive cyberscreeds. And even if, let's say for one day, they did, into which whole of utter incomprehension do you think words like "codify" and "offset" would tumble?
No, for once Sarah Palin, even if for all the wrong reasons, has something right: the media, whether from intellectual cause or effect, are limp and impotent. Yes, it is a damn shame that so many voters have the political IQ and reading comprehension skills of a slow-witted chimpanzee, but that's the country we live in. It is what it is, and nothing within the next few years is going to change the sea of ignorance in which we find ourselves collectively awash. It would seem the re-educational media have become not merely impotent, but collectively irrelevant, since counterarguments to the Fox-styled hogwash of misleading simplicity are by their very nature more complicated in structure and delivery.
Which reawakens my earlier but brief thought that the Democratic Party, through the DNC, DCCC, DSCC, should stop relying on indirect, talking-points messaging through assorted media and start counterpunching the Republican agenda directly: 30-second, 60-second spots of punchy, pithy, voter-reeducation on primetime television -- not, for heaven's sake, on MSNBC, the choir, but during all that highly rated garbage of, for instance, folks marooned on Pacific isles and trying to kill one another, or whatever it is they do, in those enlightening electronic venues.
And start the counterpunching now; don't wait till the next campaign season. Run the little advertising buggers for 365 days. Surely the money can be got. After all, the sordid Supreme Court has declared that American democracy is for sale. And, well, the Dems had better start selling a better sort of it -- now.