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Sunday, July 08, 2012

Chris Hayes Gives His Show Over to a Lying Republican Asshole Again

After a nice but hardly hard-hitting bit of discussion about climate change denialism and then the GOP's relentless generational Norquist-enabled anti-civilizationism, some corporate shill at the WSJ editorial board came onto the program and of course immediately started spewing glib flat tax mantras that had nothing to do with the actual topic at hand and then ridiculously declaring that historically low rates of taxation actually represent historically high rates of taxation and more or less took over Chris Hayes' own program from him, using it as a platform for sowing misinformation, confusion, and lies about taxes for segment after segment after segment, while all the sensible voices were squelched into silence or reduced to sardonic background chuckling and Hayes himself sputtered "but but but but but --!" for a half hour until I just had to switch the program off in disgust. This happens all the time on Hayes' show, and until he learns to actually call Republicans on their bullshit, actually stop them when they change the subject, actually respond with facts when they spew obvious falsehoods, actually shut them up when they are just running out the clock he needs to realize that he is not contributing to comity or respecting good faith disagreements but actually actively abetting the work of eager enemies of his own fervently and righteously desired equitable and sustainable outcomes.

For those who saw the show, let me just point out that it isn't really that hard to force Republicans to admit that there are some things government needs to do -- if only to stick to their stupid swinging dick law and order control fantasies and wars without end blood lust -- and that since they claim to believe "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" then it isn't really that hard to force Republicans to admit that at some point grown ups recognize you have to pay for things to do them and that taxes are the price you pay for a government that does things governments do. Obviously, a lot of these idiots don't really believe any of this at all, they either buy some Randroid fantasy of market-magic spontaneous order or they are just racist dicks who want to make uppity negroes pay for everything or some comparably insane evil nonsense, but even the ones who believe this sort of disgusting shit are unlikely to say it in public so it really can't be as hard as Chris Hayes makes it seem to stop these endless nonsense spigots if you are the well-regarded host of a goddamned national news program who attracts actually sensible actually knowledgeable actually interesting actually progressive experts to talk about real issues otherwise. Definitely you don't have to let Republicans get away with saying Democrats are "pro taxes" in some more fundamental way than Republicans are, unless to be "pro tax" means to be pro government actually existing and paying for the things it does in which case Republicans are presumably declaring themselves pro warlord violence across the land and not paying for anything ever in which case they should be made to say that and then called evil idiots to their faces, which they are.

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