Democrats Have To Learn That Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar

The Left Should Take A Tip From Freud On War & Taxes: Nine days after 9/11, George Bush said,

“And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

So the plan was to go after states that support terrorism as well as the terrorists themselves & it was immediately embraced by Conservatives who talked & wrote endlessly about the concept. So did the left meet Conservatives in the intellectual arena and debate the idea? No, to the contrary, the left largely ignored the reasons the right gave for going to war and launched a wholesale attack on vast numbers of hidden motives the Bush administration supposedly had for going to war…as if there wasn’t an army of Conservative pundits, commentators, & TV personalities explaining exactly what we wanted to do. So we were told that it was a “war for oil”, about “revenge for Bush’s daddy”, “to help make Bush’s business friends rich”, yada, yada, yada….anything, but what Bush and Conservatives claimed it was about. It was the elephant in the living room that the left simply refused to address.

Now fast forward to the present. After helping to put together one of the most successful military campaigns in the history of mankind, the Bush administration is now pushing a tax cut. The reasoning behind it is pretty simple. We can look back to the Harding, Kennedy, and Reagan administrations to see that significant tax cuts stimulated the economy and led to massive economic growth. So since the economy is soft now, it makes a lot of sense to do exactly the same thing and wait for the economy to boom. Now you’d think that whether the left agreed or disagreed with that idea, they’d at least try to deal with it, but again, to the contrary, they’re doing anything but deal with this idea head on. For example, here’s Paul Krugman’s theory about the tax cuts…

“It’s no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration’s policies might actually be driven by those ideologues – that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut – was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories.

How can this be happening? Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They don’t realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and they don’t read what the ideologues write. They imagine that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, will modify our system only at the edges, that it won’t destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years.

But the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need. The Financial Times, it seems, now understands what’s going on, but when will the public wake up?”

Yes, Bush only wants to cut taxes so he can create a financial crisis that will give us an excuse “to do away with the social and economic system we have”. It’s all so clear….not.

Let me help the left out by reminding them of something Freud said. As those of you who took Psychology 101 remember, Freud was well known for finding sexual imagery in dreams and ordinary things. But, when one of his students wondered what the significance of Freud’s smoking a cigar might be, Freud replied, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Exactly….and sometimes a war against a terrorist supporting state is designed to end their support for terrorism and sometimes a tax cut is designed to stimulate the economy.

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