Thursday, October 16, 2008

At Last, Almost

Last night Bob Schieffer came closer than either of the other Presidential Debate moderators to actually moderating a debate.  However, even he couldn't eliminate all of the rehearsed talking points*.

I was very glad that John McCain had a chance to bring up the issue of class warfare as he pandered to Joe the Plumber.  Seems Joe has worked his way from not being able to buy a business to having access to the amount of capital that could buy a business.  McCain has decided to champion Joe's quest to own the plumbing business for which he has worked for many years.  McCain says that by "spreading the wealth around" and perhaps increasing the taxes on some businesses, Barack Obama engages in class warfare.

McCain expects us to assume a few things here: 1) that the business Joe wants to buy has profits of over a quarter of a million dollars per year (otherwise the tax increase Obama recommends would have no effect on the business), and; 2) that Joe has labored for the money to buy the company.

How much does it cost to buy a company that has over $250,000 in profits per year?  It must be a heck of a lot more than a million dollars.  If Joe is a regular plumber, as he was portrayed in McCain's touching "Ode to Joe", how does he come up with that kind of money?

If McCain champions folk like Joe, wage earners who have somehow been able to amass a million or more dollars, and leave the rest of us potential voters to select the Obama-Biden ticket, then I'll be a happy American as November 5th dawns.

But I digress.  I had been writing of class warfare.

What McCain didn't mention during the evening at Hofstra is that the class war is over.  The rich people won.  All Barack Obama is trying to do on behalf of the mass of working people is renegotiate the terms of surrender.



*This phrase, "talking points", must be one of the dumbest things to come out of politics in recent years.  I'm not saying that a candidate is dumb for having a list of concepts to discuss or mention whenever a topic nearing one of those concepts has been mentioned.  I'm saying the phrase itself is dumb.

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