The Contract On America 2.0
Dumbassery.
Jebus how I used to scrutinize GOP proposals, looking for something good, fighting hard to remain the independent I was raised to be. But induction has won out, and now I barely even skim their nonsense anymore. You know without seeing it that most of what they're going to do is bullshit.
Here's Krugman on it, which you've no doubt already seen.
I basically quit at "stop job-killing tax hikes."
If they can't get past the first line without building in an almost-certainly-false quasi-presupposition[1], I'm outta there. Screw 'em. It's not even its falsehood that bugs me so much as the fact that they can't even their pet theory out of the bumper-sticker version of the statement of the policy...can't wait one page to give the (bogus) rationale, but have to squeeze it right in there. It'd be like if every time I mentioned the GOP I said 'the unhinged GOP." (Except for the being true part...)
Do these guys realize what buffoons they are? Are they at all concerned that their central strategy these days is "try to make America dumber until they agree with us?"
[1] What do you call that, anyway? The 'job-killing' bit in 'stop job-killing tax hikes'. Of course, it's ambiguous as between:
(a) Stop tax hikes that kill jobs
and
(b) Stop tax hikes, because they kill jobs.
The former would be o.k., but the latter is a policy predicated on a patent falsehood.
But anyway, what do you call that 'job-killing' bit? It's not a presupposition, right, since it's explicit. Is it like a predicate in the legal sense? Is there a grammatical term for it?
Dumbassery.
Jebus how I used to scrutinize GOP proposals, looking for something good, fighting hard to remain the independent I was raised to be. But induction has won out, and now I barely even skim their nonsense anymore. You know without seeing it that most of what they're going to do is bullshit.
Here's Krugman on it, which you've no doubt already seen.
I basically quit at "stop job-killing tax hikes."
If they can't get past the first line without building in an almost-certainly-false quasi-presupposition[1], I'm outta there. Screw 'em. It's not even its falsehood that bugs me so much as the fact that they can't even their pet theory out of the bumper-sticker version of the statement of the policy...can't wait one page to give the (bogus) rationale, but have to squeeze it right in there. It'd be like if every time I mentioned the GOP I said 'the unhinged GOP." (Except for the being true part...)
Do these guys realize what buffoons they are? Are they at all concerned that their central strategy these days is "try to make America dumber until they agree with us?"
[1] What do you call that, anyway? The 'job-killing' bit in 'stop job-killing tax hikes'. Of course, it's ambiguous as between:
(a) Stop tax hikes that kill jobs
and
(b) Stop tax hikes, because they kill jobs.
The former would be o.k., but the latter is a policy predicated on a patent falsehood.
But anyway, what do you call that 'job-killing' bit? It's not a presupposition, right, since it's explicit. Is it like a predicate in the legal sense? Is there a grammatical term for it?
posted by Winston Smith at
12:44 PM
1 Comments:
I gotta say, kudos to the Republicans on this: it's some top-notch propaganda. (Logic doesn't apply here.)
Of course (almost) anyone is against "tax cuts that kill jobs".
But with the Republican formulation, they manage to get "tax cuts" and "kill jobs" associated in a (false) general way, while they are in fact legitimately associated in a specific way.
Pure genius!
-mac
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