Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Andrew Sullivan Has A Cow...and Shows His Ass...
Pandagon fleshed out this hypocrisy from Andrew Sullivan, one of the right's more reasonable pundits.
While being reasonable, he still does have the same right-wing propensity to douse his drawers every time Hillary Clinton dares open her mouth. This time, he's bitching about a speech Hillary gave to a group of supporters.
Here's the piece:
"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
What's gone unnoticed as well is that Clinton was talking to supporters, many of whom were very rich. She's telling the rich people that support her that given the way the world works, the nation needs money to support itself, and the nation needs it from the people who've profited the most from the nation's policies. In other words, the rich.
Andrew Sullivan goes hysterical.
They know far better than you do how you should spend your money. Because they are morally better people than you are.
Besides the fact that this has always been a red herring (the point of taxation isn't that the government knows better than you how to spend your money - it's that the government, by virtue of being the government, can spend money in ways that no private citizen or group, no matter how powerful, can), the additional idiocy involved falls into two parts.
1.) Hillary Clinton didn't say she was a better person than anyone - in fact, it's a really, really strained reading to get anywhere near that gloss on her statement. She articulated a basic principle of public vs. private - the former has ways of affecting the lives of citizens that the latter doesn't.
2.) Andrew Sullivan advocated a one dollar gas tax a little over two months ago.
Here's his rationalization:
A long-term strategy to protect us from constant involvement in that region would include greater energy independence. A gas tax both helps pay for our current struggle and helps us avoid future ones. Why not therefore a war-time gas tax of a dollar a gallon? If we do not owe it to our fellow citizens, to the environment, to less traffic, to greater fuel efficiency, can we at least owe it to the troops? Or is that minimal level of personal sacrifice too much to ask of ourselves?
In other words, a gas tax for the common good. Did everyone's favorite British-but-he's-really-American conservative just do what the Clintons did? But...but...he's so ideologically pure!
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