350 Tax Increases?

[OneBlueSky]

President Bush applies the Powell Doctrine to running for re-election.

By Michael Kinsley
slate.msn.com
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 10:27 AM PT

http://slate.msn.com/id/2097656/fr/rss/

(snip)

One of the weapons in Bush's arsenal is an old family heirloom. Bush fired it himself at his big Florida rally over the weekend. He asserted that John Kerry had voted for higher taxes 350 times during Kerry's 20 years in the Senate. Vice President Dick Cheney and other presidential surrogates have been using this statistoid for several weeks, and it has been picked up and repeated in the conservative media echo chamber. In 1992, Bush's father charged that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had raised taxes 128 times. This shabby and deeply disingenuous allegation ultimately became an embarrassment to the elder Bush, but it took weeks and months of pounding by the media and the opposition to make it this way. I'm hoping to spare us all that with a Powell-Doctrine-like strike early on.

The purpose of a phony statistic like this one isn't really to persuade people of its own accuracy. The purpose is to trap your opponent in a discussion he doesn't want to have (in this case about his past votes about taxes), bog the discussion down in silly details that few people will follow, and leave a general impression that where there is smoke, there must be fire. And certainly, if what matters to you above all else is paying fewer taxes, you'd be a fool to choose Kerry over Bush. But this isn't about taxes; it's about honesty. Honesty means more than factual accuracy, it means avoiding disingenuousness: not talking crap when you know it's crap. If that matters to you above all, you may be out of luck with either candidate this election. But if you wish to measure comparative crapology, this 350-tax-increases business may be hard for Kerry to top.

- more . . . good read . . .

http://slate.msn.com/id/2097656/fr/rss/

[AndyP]

1. I'm going to be sick

I'm tired of the flat out lies comming from Bush, but I'll have to get used to it because I know it's going to stop. Here's a link to my new favorite site that some info on this subject: http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=159