Thursday, November 03, 2005

Once again Republican senators exceed expectations

Even after 5 years of Bush gangsterism, it still astonishes me every time the Republicans show their true colors. And they do it all the time, with supreme arrogance. They never stop. It takes your breath away.

Today they voted to rape and pillage the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to provide a few months worth of gasoline for America's SUVs, and, in the same bill, they voted to loot the finances and rape the health of the elderly and the sick by cutting Medicare and Medicaid to pay for their previous tax cuts for billionaires.

The rationale for the the Medicare/Medicaid cut? To reduce the deficit. The cutback in Medicaid and Medicare is $35 billion. Hard on the heels of this deficit "reduction" measure is a new round of tax cuts amounting to $70 billion, aimed primarily at benefiting the wealthy, just like the previous tax cuts.

So the deficit "reduction" of $35 billion is, in reality, a deficit increase of $35 billion--a coincidental symmetry in this case, but one startling in its inversion of normal English meanings.

It is indeed a very odd, but, you have to admit if you think about it, quintessentially Republican use of the term "deficit reduction," when the dollar amount of the "reduction" is almost exactly the dollar amount of what we remaining native speakers of English still call its "increase."

Up is down. Black is white. Orwell spins in his grave.

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