Rush Limbaugh is very upset that the Republicans' new tax deform plan includes any breaks for poor and middle class people. While I am eternally angry that poor and middle class white people give this guy the time of day, I recognize that Rush speaks to their "economic anxiety," which is code for racism.
This Limbaugh attack on tax deform would be funny were it not for the ending. First, he goes after Republicans.
"Even this Republican tax plan -- I've had more time to look into this, and there are parts of this thing -- folks, they're so frustrating. It's just so damn frustrating, it's just out of this mind frustrating," he ranted.
"We run the House, we run the Senate, we have the White House and still it's like we have a bunch of Republicans who don't even have the courage to be conservative. They've lost their conservative ideas because they're playing the same old game that the Democrats love to play, class envy."
Gosh, who would have imagined Republicans pitting one group of people against another? Wow, I never would have thought of such a thing, would you?
The two things that bug Rush the most are Republicans "making a big deal out of taxing the rich" and "holding on to the Children's Health Program."
Here's where it turns dark and ugly. Rush first tells his listeners that CHIP "was devised by Obama, supplementary to Obamacare."
No. It wasn't. The CHIP program was a bipartisan bill proposed by Hillary Clinton, long before Obama was even on the national stage. Rush Limbaugh knows this, or he should know it, but apparently he's too damned lazy to check with Auntie Google for the right answer. If he had, he'd know that CHIP rose out of the failed Clinton health care initiative and was guided through by Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama. Here's a handy Wikipedia link for him.
Remember CHIPs? The CHIPs program was a program devised by Obama, supplementary to Obamacare. And I'll never forget it because it was paid for with the sales tax revenue from the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products, which prompted me at the time to suggest that we need to give smokers a medal. That we need to start treating smokers as heroes, and we need to encourage them to keep it up because they are paying for this new Children's Health Program.
Apparently in Rushbo's mind, Clinton was never president and Obama was instead president from 1992-2016 or something. Tobacco revenues are so 1990s.
Rush continued to rant about it, wishing death upon a program which gives children access to health care. What a guy. What a respecter of life.
"Well anyway, it ought to die," he groused. "It ought to go away. What with the effort now to repeal Obamacare and downsize it. But it's not, it's not going to go away."
"It is a program that was designed to fix a shortfall, something had happened and there wasn't enough health insurance for poor kids so the CHIPs program came along, and addressed the problem -- it didn't work. And so now we're adding another addendum to it or keeping this program alive when it hasn't justified itself. It's an abject failure, it ought to just be punted, we have the power to do this."
How many lies can he pack into a single rant? First the program was intended to make sure poor children could get health care, because as a society it's bad to let children die in the streets from preventable diseases. It's good to value our children and help them stay healthy so they can learn and come up in society and maybe succeed and not be poor anymore.
Second, it DID work. It has worked magnificently, and at far lower costs than if we let children die in the streets from preventable diseases.
The only abject failure is Rush Limbaugh, who continues to receive money for spewing hatred and lies into the atmosphere, causing us all to choke on his toxic fumes.
