Red, White and Liberal

by Alan Colmes

  The Straw Person Hall of Fame

  Hillary Clinton deserves placement in the Straw Man Hall of Fame. Okay, we'll make it the Straw Person Hall of Fame. Hillary can't say the word president without conservatives saying it's a subliminal wish that she were living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

  again. If they take attendance and Hillary says "present" they say, "She really meant 'president'." And when conservatives say that Hillary wants to be president, what they're really trying to do is warn and alarm America. They're saying, "You'd better lock your doors, grab the kids, and hide your money. Hillary Clinton may run the country and no one will be safe." And how dare this American citizen, duly elected by a wide margin to the United States Senate from one of America's largest states, how dare she even think about one day running for the White House! Conservatives think it's bad enough that any Democrat would have ambition to run for public office, but there's something about Hillary that drives them crazy.

  So worried were conservatives that Hillary might one day seek higher office that, according to Robert Novak, "A prominent conservative operative in Washington, fearing the prospect of Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket for vice president next year, is urging Senate Republicans 'not to do anything to help her ambitions by building a Senate record.' Specifically, he urged not co-signing letters or co-sponsoring legislation with Clinton, not getting photographed with her, and not socializing or traveling with her."

  So not only should conservatives not legislate with her, even if they can agree on something in a bipartisan way, they shouldn't even be seen with her. This is a long way from the days of Tip O'Neill. When President Reagan wanted to know why the Democratic Speaker of the House had blasted his economic plan when they had had such a wonderful time together just a few nights before, O'Neill told him, "OF buddy, that's politics. After six o'clock we can be friends but before six, it's politics." But Hillary was to be treated as though she had the plague. Unfortunately, some conservatives believe that liberalism and the plague are synonymous. This can't be good for America.

  Appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews in November 2002, Hillary was asked about Bush's motive to go to war with Iraq. Matthews wanted to know if she thought it had to do with weapons of mass destruction or if there were other reasons for wanting to remove Saddam. She replied, "I think there a lot of reasons. I mean it is clear that a lot of people in this administration have some old scores to settle with Saddam Hussein. But I cannot discount the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of somebody who has repeatedly demonstrated that he will do anything in order to keep and maintain his power."

  All her enemies heard was, "Bush has an old score to settle." It was the president himself who said during a speech in Houston in the days leading up to the push to go into Iraq that Saddam was "the guy who tried to kill my dad." Nevertheless, Hillary was attacked for accusing the president of starting a war based on a personal vendetta. And this in spite of her vote in the Senate to authorize the president to use all necessary means to deal with Iraq.

  And the Popular Vote Winner Is ...

  One great lie we still (and will probably always) hear is that Al Gore tried to steal the election of 2000. How do you steal what you've already won? If only we could do away with that obsolete Electoral College and actually allow voters to pick the president directly. The further lie is that Al Gore acted inappropriately, as though Bush 43 would have done anything differendy had roles been reversed. Even before Election Day that year, here's what Andrew Miga reported in the Boston Herald: "The Bush camp, sources said, would likely challenge die legitimacy of a Gore win, casting it as an affront to the people's will and branding the Electoral College as an antiquated relic." There is precedent for Republican behavior in such situations. In 1984, Democrat incumbent Frank McCloskey was unseated by challenger Richard Mclntyre in Indiana's "Bloody 8th" congressional district by 34 votes. A county-by-county recount was done, widening the lead to 418 votes. Then it went to the House, where McCloskey won by 4 votes. One Republican congressman was so incensed by this he said, "I think we ought to go to war." He later added, "There's unanimity. We need bold and dramatic action [to get McCloskey's win overturned]." That person happened to be Wyoming's Richard Cheney, a future vice president of the United States, thanks to another postelection battle. Jack Kemp, then a congressman, and a future vice presidential nominee, referred to this as "political and moral outrage at the outright theft of the seat in the 8th District of Indiana," and President Reagan called it "damned robbery."

  More recently there were charges of ineligible voters casting ballots, absentee ballots being delivered illegally, groups being illegally persuaded to vote, and unaccounted-for ballots. This time, though, it was 1996, and the person making these charges and calling for a recount was Representative Bob Dornan, the Republican firebrand from Orange County, California, who lost to Democrat Loretta Sanchez by 984 votes.

  As conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in the Chicago Tribune on November 29, 2000, "We can also comfortably assume that George W. Bush's team would have done the same were circumstances reversed."

  The Reagan Myth

  Ronald Reagan has achieved near-mythical status in conservative America. We have heard for years that Reagan lowered taxes and deficits simultaneously, and that this is a tribute to the theory of supply-side economics.

  In fact, Reagan raised taxes and increased the deficits. Congressman Gene Taylor of Mississippi, known as a Blue Dog Democrat, and one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, accurately states: "Almost half of the increased revenues of the Reagan era came from Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, which were increased by President Reagan and Congress in 1983. The Reagan Administration and the split Congress also raised taxes in 1982, 1984, and 1986, although back then they were called 'revenue enhancements'."

  When Reagan assumed office in January 1981, the federal deficit was $79 billion and the debt was $908.5 billion, or 34 percent of the gross domestic product. By the end of the Reagan era, in 1988, in spite of what we were promised by Reagan/Bush 41, the deficit was $152.5 billion and the debt was $2.6 trillion, or 54 percent of the GDP. In 1992, as Bush 41 was leaving office, those figures had increased to a deficit of $255.1 billion, and a debt of $4.1 trillion, representing 67 percent of the GDP.

  Reagan's final budget for fiscal year 1990 called for spending of $1.15 trillion, compared with $678.2 billion in 1981. Fifteen percent of monies allocated in this budget went to service the debt. Domestic programs were cut by $18 billion, with the agriculture budget alone down by 18 percent. At the same time, the plan called for a 44 percent increase in the "$tar Wars" missile defense budget and a 50 percent pay raise for members of Congress and other federal officials. Even more troubling, $16 billion in 1990 and $9 billion in 1991 were set aside to bail out savings and loans institutions, which were damaged by Reagan's own deregulatory policies in the first place. All this, while eighty domestic programs were to be cut to save $4.9 billion.

  In converse proportion to the elevation of Ronald Reagan to cultlike status is the attempted diminution of Bill Clinton. Conservatives can't even acknowledge how much better the economy was during the Clinton years, saying Clinton inherited a good economy for which Bush 41 never received credit. They've invented the term "Clinton recession" to attach our forty-second president's name to a faltering economy.

  Don't conservatives preach personal responsibility? When there's a conservative Congress, a Democratic president, and a good economy, they claim credit; when there's a Democratic Congress, a conservative president (Reagan), and a bad economy, the Congress gets the blame.

  Trickle-Down Thinking

  For years during the 1980s and 1990s conservatives couldn't speak more than two sentences without spouting the words balanced budget. They even wanted a balanced budget amendment. Forget that it was Reagan's "Star Wars" fantasy in the era of big defense overruns, double billing, and hundred-dollar airplane ashtrays that helped to dr
ive up the deficit. Forget that it was Bill Clinton, a Democratic president who, during his first two years in office, with a Democratic House and Senate, cut the deficit in half. Any Republicans want to push a balanced budget amendment now? Anyone? On Christmas Eve 2002, the Bush 43 administration asked Congress to consider another increase in the federal debt limit. Nice that they wanted to give themselves a little Christmas present at taxpayer expense and do it at a time when they knew it wouldn't get much attention.

  Republicans accuse Democrats of playing class warfare when they point out that conservative economic policies favor the rich over the poor. They can't bear to hear the phrase "tax cuts for the rich." How else do you explain a plan in which according to Citizens for Tax Justice, as reported in the New York Times, "the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers—those with annual incomes over $356,000— would receive about half the revenue the government would lose next year if dividends went untaxed and 45 percent of all the money from accelerating the rate cuts? The 80 percent of households with incomes below $73,000 a year would get less than 10 percent of the new tax breaks." At the time this plan was proposed by the Bush 43 administration, R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the president's Council of Economic advisors, said, "the increasing reliance on taxing higher-income households and targeted social preferences at lower incomes stands in the way of moving to a simpler, natter system." Nothing like sacrificing the well-being of the needy in the name of simplicity and flatness.

  We can all agree that the rich pay more in taxes because they make more, but in terms of who gets the most breaks according to the Bush plan, we're talking percentages, and that proves that it is disproportionately weighted. Republicans can yell "class warfare" at liberals all they want, but simply accusing liberals of this doesn't make it so. This is a brilliant tactic, often used by the right, of accusing the left of what they themselves are doing.

  Because Congress promised that revenue loss from tax cuts would be limited to $1.35 trillion over ten years, and that it would be encoded in the budget provision, they had to include a "sunset provision," whereby the tax cuts expired after nine years. That was the only way they could maintain the $1.35 trillion figure. We couldn't afford these tax cuts, and making them permanent was fiscally irresponsible. And economic theory indicates that unless you permanently put money in someone's pocket, they're not going to spend it.

  In a Wall Street Journal piece on November 1, 2001, Bruce Bartlett, Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, dispelled the right's notion that tax rebates would stimulate the economy and punched a hole in their beloved "trickle-down" theory:

  A federal tax rebate in 1974 and state tax rebates since did not raise consumer spending much, if at all. The available data from this year's rebate only confirm this conclusion. People simply socked away the money or used it to pay down debt, which is the same thing. This follows from something economists call the "permanent income hypothesis." It says that people raise their spending only in response to permanent increases in income. Temporary increases do not change spending patterns.

  The Bush economic plan introduced at the beginning of 2003 was called "bold" by his supporters. I'd use the word audacious. The centerpiece of the plan was the elimination of the tax dividend on stock. This benefits the investor class, not the average person. According to IRS data, only 22 percent of taxpayers with income under $100,000 have any dividend income. I'm absolutely stunned that more average Americans, who didn't get much the first time around, who didn't do better under Reagan, and who have little to gain under the Republican plan, nevertheless, attack the Democrats, whose plan serves them much better.

  Another phrase, used as a mantra by Republicans, is "tax-and-spend Democrats," But look who's spending. In Bush 43's State of the Union address in 2003, he offered $10 billion in new money for AIDS treatment in Africa, $1.2 billion for hydrogen-powered cars, $450 million to mentor youngsters, $600 million for drug treatment, and $400 billion to strengthen Medicare. Would the great applause he received for these programs from the right side of the aisle be as thunderous were the speech delivered by a "tax-and-spend Democrat"?

  Democrats have been talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes (the very ones Reagan raised), which would give more Americans an opportunity to share in the tax cuts. And these are the Americans who need it most, who would spend it rather than hoard it, and for whom a few dollars would go a long way. The Democratic plan, offered to counter the Bush 43 plan to line the pockets of corporations, did two major things that the Bush 43 plan didn't: it offered to stimulate the economy sooner rather than later, and to focus on those who needed the money most. And it did so at a cost of $136 billion, not the $670 billion that the Republicans would have added to the already-mushrooming deficit. So who are the real taxers and spenders?

  Another myth about Ronald Reagan concerns just what his military experience was. He loved to reminisce about his World War II experiences. Defending his unfortunate trip to the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where members of Hitler's SS were buried, Reagan proclaimed, "Yes I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself." Al Hunt wrote in the September 28, 2000, edition of the Wall Street Journal that "... in his 1965 autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, Reagan commented on the rigors of war: 'By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up, make love to my wife. . . . ' " Hunt went on to report that "Mr. Reagan actually spent the war years making training films and spending most nights at home. In 1983 the Gipper regaled Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal with his memories of photographing Nazi death camps at the end of the war. But Mr. Reagan never left the country during that war, period."

  Dead Straw Men Tell No Lies

  One of the arguments the right tries to force on the left is that President John F. Kennedy was a tax-cutter who would support the Bush 43 tax cut plan. But let's set some things straight here.

  At the time of the 1963 tax cuts, the top tax rate was 91 percent, and only 6 percent of the Kennedy cuts went to those making more than $300,000, in today's dollars. Now, deficits are much larger as a percentage of the economy, and the deficit is growing. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson saw it going in the other direction. Senator Ted Kennedy may be closer to the situation than the conservatives trying to make hay with his brother's name. And he was rightfully indignant about the use of his brother's voice in GOP-sponsored advertising. "It stretches decency a bit when selling that program for Republican leaders to be using President Kennedy's voice in these several states [in radio ads] in support of his tax cut in 1961 as a suggestion that he might support this tax cut. He certainly would not have," Senator Kennedy said in 2001. "It is intellectually dishonest and politically irresponsible to suggest that President Kennedy would have supported such a tax cut. It is a dramatic misreading of history to compare President Kennedy's and President Bush's tax cut proposals."

  In 1963 the national debt was $250 billion, roughly fourteen times less than what it is today. Listen, if JFK's ideas were so good for America, why did Republicans vote for Richard Nixon?

  It's a phony tactic to hold up a respected dead person on the other side of the political spectrum to convince your opponent of the wrongheadedness of his or her ideas. It would be nice to be able to do what Woody Allen did in Annie Hall, when his character, Alvy Singer, heard someone in a movie theater line misinterpret the writings of Marshall McLuhan. Woody's character brought out the real McLuhan to face the camera and set the record straight.

  In his book The End of Racism: Principles far a Multicultural Society, conservative author Dinesh D'Souza attempts to stake his claim as an heir to Martin Luther King Jr. on the issue of affirmative action. One line, taken from King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the dream that his children might one day "be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," is used as Exhibit A. But in King's 1963 work, Why We
Can't Wait, King advocated "compensatory consideration" for blacks, and in his final book, in 1967, Where Do We Go from Here? King wrote: "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years, he must now do something special far him." As for D'Souza, he claims that slavery, "proved to be the transmission belt that nevertheless brought Africans into the orbit of modern civilization and Western freedom." I never saw anything like THAT in the "I Have a Dream" speech. And, although, unlike some conservatives, I don't speak for the dead, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that King would not have supported D'Souza's desire to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  So, conservatives, come up with your own heroes. Stop shamelessly appropriating ours for your own political gain. And if you really want to know what the dead are thinking, get yourself some tickets to "Crossing Over" or go see the psychic George Anderson.

  Contraindications of the Truth

  Listening to the way conservatives attempt to eviscerate liberals, you would think everyone on the right is of the George "I cannot tell a lie" Washington ethic. But lying is not solely the province of the left. On January 26, 1987, President Reagan told the Tower Commission, created to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, that he approved of the sale of arms to Iran in return for hostages in August 1985. This confirmed testimony by National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. But had this story stood, White House chief of staff Donald Regan could have been brought up on perjury charges for having testified otherwise. On February 2, 1987, Reagan told the Tower Commission that, after speaking with Donald Regan, he realized that arms for hostages were not approved in advance, thus changing what he said during his testimony one week earlier. It became obvious that Reagan was talking from prepared notes when he mistakenly read his instructions aloud: "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."