Last night Mary Landrieu was on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren, attempting to explain her rant about Obama’s tax rate capitulation the other day. We watched it three times and couldn’t make heads nor tails out of any of it. And then we came to a realization. Watch it yourself and see if your conclusion is similar.
Well? What did you think? Could you make heads or tails of that?
What we came up with was she’s dumb as a brick. That’s the best we could do.
Some 47 percent of American households don’t pay federal income tax. Mary Landrieu isn’t ignorant of this fact. So how does she justify a statement suggesting that we’ll be borrowing money from the poor to give it to millionaires? How are you borrowing money from the poor when the poor don’t pay taxes? The poor don’t buy T-Bills, so it’s not like they’re loaning it to you. If she’s talking about the fact that by running up deficits it’s likely we’ll end up debasing the currency, and the resulting inflation will hurt the poor, then perhaps she’s got a point – though that would constitute far more sophisticated economic analysis we’ve seen out of Landrieu to date.
Except that point loses a lot of its value when you consider that the tax rates are only part of the deficit equation, and the lesser part at that. The most important factor in a budget is and has always been expenditures. Van Susteren attempts to get Landrieu to talk about spending, and she won’t take the bait. All she wants to talk about is wealth redistribution.
That in and of itself doesn’t make Landrieu a dunce. It makes her a socialist and it makes a complete mockery of her pretentions at centrism. What makes Landrieu an idiot is that she trots out this swill on Fox News.
One assumes Landrieu has to know who watches Fox News. Greta isn’t Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, sure, but the audience of her show – particularly among her constituents in Louisiana – is going to be a center-right audience. Wealth redistribution won’t play with that crowd like it will on CNN or MSNBC.
Did she forget who she was talking to? Who’s watching? Or does she just not care? And if not, can’t she read a poll and realize what the “Workers Of The World Unite” speech is worth back home? Did she not see how poorly the class warfare card played for Charlie Melancon last month? It’s just plain stupid for her to run her mouth all week like this.
Perhaps we’ve got it wrong and this is Landrieu throwing caution and calculation to the wind. Perhaps she’s decided she’s not running for re-election in 2014 and we’re going to get Mary being Mary for the next four years. And if that’s the case, it’s entirely possible what she’s really doing is cozying up to the majority in Orleans Parish, who have elected Cedric Richmond as their congressman and her brother as the mayor and who get off on hard-left rhetoric. By coddling the base, she might be running interference for Mitch so he can keep his mouth shut and still keep the constituents happy.
That analysis only makes sense if Mitch still has statewide ambitions and Mary doesn’t any longer. The rest of the state will be in an uproar over her anti-capitalist tangent, particularly as it follows a capitulation of her own on the Jacob Lew/OMB hold as an attempt to save offshore oil from the Obama administration. But if Mary-The-Centrist-Clinton-Democrat-Senator ends up to the left of Mitch-The-Competent-Technocrat-New-Orleans-Mayor, perhaps she might be able to pass the baton to him in 2014 – another rumor being bandied about among the state’s politicos.
But if none of that is the straight dope, we’re back to our default position – patent cretinism. Though we’re open to other opinions.
Advertisement
Advertisement
