Tuesday, July 17, 2012

WARM ENOUGH YET?

As we suffer through the fourth, I think it is, heat wave of a summer that's only a couple of weeks old, and the hottest summer on record, and the entire country suffers from the worst drought in over half a century, and extreme weather becomes "the new normal," the right continues to propagate the lie that all would be made right if we only cut more taxes, especially on the wealthy.

The fires that raged recently in Colorado, caused by "ghost forests" (trees hollowed out by bugs moving North as heat zones extend further and further North) and exceptionally dry weather and high winds, etc. were eventually controlled by firefighters paid for by the rest of us because that area of Colorado is mostly populated by people whose minds have been taken over by rightwing media propaganda and so even local officials have taken the Norquist pledge to not only never raise taxes but to cut and cut and cut them so that local firefighters had been cut to a smaller force than ever, etc. etc. etc.

This is a ploy of the right, to get state and local governments to cut taxes so they are forced to cut workers so the federal government is forced to rescue them causing a larger federal deficit that the right can then rail against and use to cut even more government etc. etc. If it hurts the rest of us, tough. The irony is it hurts a lot of rightwingers most (the states where the drought has been worst until this year were almost exclusively so-called "red" states).

Anyway, it's too hot to spend too much time on this rant, let's all find a good air conditioned movie, maybe there's one about how the rightwingers clung to their misinformed beliefs as all they cared about burned to the ground while their corporate masters built bigger and safer guarded zones of air conditioned relief for themselves. Nah, that'd be too depressing.

3 comments:

AlamedaTom said...

Lal, you know all of this warming stuff is just a left-wing conspiracy. Ooops! An iceberg the size of Manhattan just broke off from Greenland's Petermann Glacier! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18896770

Lally said...

I hear ya Willy. This editorial in today's NY Times sums it up pretty nicely:

Lally said...

woops. I'll post it since the link doesn't work in comments for some reason.