Tea Party Hoax and Hokum
by digby
Breitbart protege Dana Loesch is quickly becoming one of the new darlings of the cable news universe. She's quite well-spoken and confident, but like Sarah Palin, she speaks gibberish. Bill Maher was unable to disarm her on his show last week because she threw out some double entendres which distracted him and rendered her nonsense charmingly sexy.
Elliot Spitzer is the first one I've seen to actually call her out:
SPITZER: Well, let me ask one more question. Do you want to repeal the provision that permits people with pre-existing conditions to get health insurance?
LOESCH: Do I want to repeal pre-existing conditions? Well, I think you have to look at health insurance, too, in this way, it's a policy against catastrophic situations. It's like, you don't go out and get homeowners insurance after your house is already on fire. So, you have to look at it in a proper perspective. But I do want to say that the separation of church and state wasn't in the Constitution. It was a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Danbury Baptists.
SPITZER: Say that again. Wait a minute, there is this thing called the First Amendment in the Constitution. But so you do want to repeal pre-existing conditions? I just want to make sure the public understands this.
LOESCH: Well, no. You're trying to frame it that I hate anyone that would have any kind of problems of getting health insurance coverage and that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that there are -- children, right now, the way the health control law is written, children are even exempt. There are massive loopholes in this health insurance that already discriminates against people that have pre-existing conditions, but that was one of the things that we didn't find out until we passed it, like Nancy Pelosi said.
Waaaah? That's just 100% bullshit. But you have to admit that "the health control law" is pretty good stuff. I have a feeling that one might catch on.
SPITZER: OK, can we go back to your other priorities? Are you going to also try to defund or repeal the financial re-regulation bill, Dodd-Frank is the technical name, you going to try to repeal that so we go back to the Wild West of Wall Street craziness?
LOESCH: Well, I don't know. Are Democrats going to try to keep control of Social Security and deny people the choice of investing their own money and growing their own nest egg? I mean, we can do that.
That's going to come as something of a surprise to retirement planners all over the country who think they are quite legally investing people's own money and grwoing their own nest eggs every single day. But it always sounds good to say that people are ebing "denied" something when they are actually being guaranteed a benefit.
SPITZER: Whoa, whoa, if you're saying are we going to try to protect our seniors and not privatize which would have sent tens of millions of seniors into poverty, you bet we are, and I think anybody today...
LOESCH: Oh, it would have not have. There isn't any Social Security money, anyway. You're going off the presupposition that there's money in Social Security.
SPITZER: You guys don't know how to read a table. You don't know how to read an actuarial table.
LOESCH: It's already broke. Medicare's broke. The president even proposed to cut more from Medicare. There are cuts already in this law.
She says it so it must be true.
SPITZER: Answer the question. Are you going to try to repeal the financial regulation bill that imposed constraints on what the bank finally can do? Are you going to repeal that one, also.
LOESCH: I am not for any legislation where the government attempts to regulate the private sector because the government is horrible at stimulating jobs, that's not one of the enumerated powers of the Constitution.
Spitzer then brought up Rand Paul and said she must agree with him that the civil rights laws should be repealed. Like the Brietbartian she is, she launched into an aggressive, hostile denial, saying he was calling her a racist. It ended like this:
LOESCH: Rand Paul wasn't talking about the repeal of the civil rights -- Rand Paul was making an example of the government exceeding 10th Amendment rights and how certain things needed to be dealt with an a state level.
SPITZER: That is why he said he'd repeal...
LOESCH: If you want to be ignorant about the topics and completely gloss over that and say that, well, that's somebody's being a racist, then they are completely misunderstanding A, argument and B, the 10th Amendment practice and the context of that conversation.
See, she's better at obfuscation than Palin, but it's just as nonsensical. (And saying Spitzer the former Attorney general of New York is "ignorant about the topics" is fairly amusing.)
PARKER: All right, Dana, I want to ask you, what I'm hearing in Washington is that what happens on November 3, that is once these Tea Party candidates move into Congress, what happens then depends on what President Obama does. And so, I wanted to ask you what would you like to see him do on November 3?
LOESCH: Oh gosh, the very first thing that I would like to see is an extension of the Bush tax cuts. Because we're going into a new year and businesses, middle class Americans have no idea what's happening with their finances, because we don't know what's going to be coming down the track with this. I mean, this is going to be a huge tax hike by way of repeal of tax cuts, so that's something that has everyone really terrified. And I don't know if we have ever post election, have ever entered a period where we just honestly didn't know what's going to happen. That's really bad for business.
SPITZER: Well, let's get rid of this bogeyman. The Republicans are holding up the extension of the middle class tax cuts to protect the rich who don't need it. This is going to add $1 trillion to our deficit every year. So, where are you going to fund that trillion dollars? Tell me right now, where will you cut the budget? Where you going to cut?
I think her conflation of the Wall Street "uncertainly" trope with the middle class is quite clever. She's saying that the middle class's financial terror is because they aren't sure if their taxes are going up next year, which is absurd. Their financial angst is because we have 10% unemployment and they are all stuck in overvalued houses and nowhere jobs with little chance of escape.
But it's a good line. She's got a lot of them.
LOESCH: Well, we'll cut stimulus and repeal...
SPITZER: That's not moneys in the budget. That's not money in the budget, Dana.
LOESCH: No, here's the thing...
PARKER: Let her talk, Eliot.
LOESCH: You're framing the argument in a crazy way, you're saying that they are trying to protect the rich with tax cuts. Do you not understand that when you heavily tax corporations that this ends up where you have higher unemployment than the unemployment that you originally had...
Here she's conflating the corporate tax rates with the income tax rates for people who make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year. At this point, I'm not sure if she's doing it on purpose in order to obscure the fact that she advocating for trickle down economics or whether she's just talking as fast as she can to get out of the hole.
Spitzer is done:
SPITZER: Dana, your economics is worse than voodoo economics. You're numbers don't add...
LOESCH: It's basic economics 101. I'm not talking about (INAUDIBLE)...
SPITZER: No it isn't. You're negative 101. Dana, answer this question. Answer this question: Where will you cut $1 trillion, every year, from the budget, to fund those tax cut extensions? What are you going to do?
LOESCH: I would cut out any excessive egregious spending that is unrelated to the enumerated powers that our government has in the Constitution...
SPITZER: That's gibberish, Dana, gibberish. It means nothing. I'm sorry.
LOESCH: That's not gibberish.
SPITZER: Means absolutely nothing.
LOESCH: Do you not know what government is allowed to do according to the Constitution?
SPITZER: OK, there it is, hoax and hokum from the Tea Party.
Indeed, it is.
But this is how they get over. They're talking about issues that make most people's eyes glaze over --- economics, tax policy, "enumerated powers in the constitution." And she is very confident, very strong and most importantly she speaks in cadences that sound as if they make sense even if they don't. She's attractive and she smiles a lot when she's talking. But she is one of the worst Tea party liars I've ever seen. On every show she's been on, she simply makes things up out of whole cloth and throws it out there daring someone to get into an argument over specifics. It's quite a schtick.
I think Spitzer did the best thing -- just call it gibberish, hokum and a hoax, which it is. If you grant this crap any validity at all, you've already lost the argument.
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