The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Old and Busted: Sippin’ Slurpees
New and Hot: Corporate Jets

Posted on | July 1, 2011 | 23 Comments

When President Obama accused Republicans of wanting to “compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break,” Lachlan Markay of the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Obama’s massive 2009 stimulus included tax breaks for — wait for it — corporate jet owners. So the president was condemning Republicans for supporting his own policy.

This caused the White House and Media Matters to shriek that Heritage was just makin’ up stuff, but the facts are right there in a February 2009 Associated Press story.

So then the White House and Media Matters changed their claim: The Very Bad Tax Breaks the president was condemning were actually not the ones he’d signed into law, but some other tax breaks for which they could blame Republicans. All in all, it was a carnival of errors for the Left, and Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation was in the Gloat Zone last night:

We appreciate that folks at the White House are not having a good day. It started when a liberal commentator on their favorite network called the President a vulgarity, and it has not gotten better. The debt ceiling speech that liberal pundit Chris Matthews fantasized would turn the president into “Give ‘Em Hell, Barry” (Matthews’ words, not ours) has not exactly set the world on fire. Unemployment is still 9.1%, we are no closer to a deal to cut spending and pollster Rasmussen announced that only 21% of Americans strongly approve of the president’s performance, against 39% who strongly disapprove.
So what do you do if you’re a White House communicator? Well, you go after The Heritage Foundation, of course! Hopefully America will be distracted from economic incompetence.

What’s interesting to me in the whole fracas is this: Obama’s line about tax breaks for corporate jets wasn’t just something he improvised on the spur of the moment. He mentioned it six times during his press conference, so it was obviously a pre-planned talking point that his handlers had scripted. And as Rush Limbaugh said yesterday, “That’s all Obama’s got. All he has is class warfare.”

Evidently, the White House was planning to use this tax-breaks-for-corporate-jets line as their Secret Weapon to win the debate over the debt ceiling, and when it backfired on them, they had no Plan B, so they spent an entire day trying to salvage it.

It’s like that stupid car-in-the-ditch-and-Republicans-sipping-Slurpees line that Obama kept using during the mid-term election campaign. He kept saying it over and over again, like some kind of magic incantation, and what was the result? Republican landslide.


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Category: Barack Obama, Budget, Taxes

Comments

  • JeffS

    I’d like to think that Obama and his flying monkeys are stuck on stupid, but never underestimate an enemy. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Gillen/1366479171 Dan Gillen

    hey they paid a lot of money to have that corporate jets line focus grouped they can’t abandon it right away.  

  • http://kingshamus.wordpress.com/ KingShamus

    The best part is the obvious coordination between Media Flatters and Team Bamster.

    Oh wait, I meant to say the best part is that–once again–Obama fails.

    I hope he continues to fail.

  • http://twitter.com/xRedRoverx Kristi

    The degree to which the average American demonizes Republicans, however, is still quite profound.  The mechanism of this decades-old campaign to blind voters to the truth can be seen all around us, and pervades every part of our society today. 

    You’re right:  Blaming Republicans for all hypocrisy and all the world’s ills is really all the fuel Democrats have in their tank, but that tank is gigantic.  

    I like to think in my more optimistic moments that Barry and his boys’ blind reliance on their propaganda machine may be the nudge that finally makes the whole wobbly structure come rattling and crashing down.  Even at best, however, the struggle is far from over. 

  • http://constitutionclub.org/ The Hairy Beast

    Another gaffe? Good thing Obama’s not a Republican or people would say he’s a flake.

  • DaveO

    Corporate jets, death panels, Rolls Royce Republicans – all part of finding something that will stick in folks’ minds.

    “Death Panels” resonated with folks, and makes each day’s unveiling of part of Obamacare understandable. The POTUS hoped to score with “Corporate Jets” but that will probably fail. Not why he feels the need to try: he’s only up against Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell – not exactly rhetorical firebrands or ideological purists.

    “Gone golfing, back later” - speaks the POTUS’s work ethic rather aptly.

  • Anonymous

    they paid a lot of money to have that corporate jets line focus grouped

    They should demand a refund.

  • Confutus

    Don’t his comments  sound the least bit hypocritical, coming from  someone who gets the use of Air Force One as a perk of his office?

  • Anonymous

    LulzSec are trying to hack AF1′s transponder to “Bandit One”… no reason…

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Nawh….he’s just a mutant.

  • Anonymous

    No they should hire a researcher and a couple of professional skeptics. This White House never wonders let alone researches possible downsides on anything they decide do.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Thanks to Cryin’ John joining Barry Palmer on the links, it makes it harder to use his tee time against him.

    The GOP shouldn’t be palling around with the Left or negotiating with them.  It’s always going to be a no-win situation.

    Goddamn Stupid Party.

  • johnl

    What’s with the hate for jets? If you are paying your CEO thousands of dollars an hour, you want him working all the way through his flight. You want him flying into Bob Hope instead of LAX. 

  • http://2011.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

    Shhhhhhh. When your opponent is making a mistake, let him.

  • timburns116

    An entire political movement which is ignorant of the concept of analogy and metaphor?  Right wingers take their anti-intellectualism to new heights

  • JeffS

    Except that common practice calls for using a metaphor or analogy once, MAYBE twice, during any one speech. 

    Not 6 times.  That changes the “metaphor” or “analogy” into a talking point. 

    Either that, or President Present needs to fire his speech writers and policy advisers.  Or maybe update the firmware in TOTUS.

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    If the Republicans were smart, they’d offer a compromise on the budget. It goes like this-

    Mr. President, instead of raising taxes on private jets, let’s raise taxes to one hundred cents on the dollar for air travel in general. This would raise revenue, and at the same time would lead to drastic reductions in air travel, which will make air travel safer and easier to manage. It would also drastically reduce the amount of carbon emissions in the upper atmosphere, which could in turn help to reverse Global Climate Change.

    Finally it would free up more crude oil for refining into gasoline for automobiles and for electricity production, which would bring down the price of gasoline, electricity, and heating fuel, and thus provide a big boost to the economy in general.

    I like it, but the Republicans aren’t going to offer it and if they did Obama wouldn’t agree to it. Well, for one thing it would probably wreck the air travel industry (boo hoo), and the main selling point would be an admission that raising taxes is bad for the economy.

    Sort of like raising taxes on cigarettes in order to reduce the number of smokers is pretty much an admission of the same thing.

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  • http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/ Moneyrunner

    The Yacht Tax Rises from the Grave; This Time It Wears Wings.

    Remember the yacht tax? That was back in 1991 when the class warriors in congress decided that putting an excise tax on boats over $100,000 was an easy and painless way of taxing the rich.

    Well, that’s not the way it worked out. The rich decided not to buy any new yachts. Instead of collecting taxes from the rich, the government ended up putting thousands of workers – the middle class that builds boats – at boatyards and marinas out of work.

    The executive vice president of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, Frank Scalpone, said the tax had already adversely affected the nation’s top boat builders. He cited companies like Pearson Yachts, O’Day Corporation, Shannon Boat Builders and Bristol Yachts as ones that have been forced out of business. “For production boat builders fighting the recession, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mr. Scalpone said.

    How stupid do you have to be not to foresee this? Apparently you have to be as stupid as the average Democrat in government, as stupid as Barack Obama is about all the rest of the economy. Nothing, literally nothing that Obama has done about the US economy has worked out. Not the “stimulus,” not “cash for clunkers,” not support for underwater mortgages, not his “green jobs” initiatives, not his promise of “shovel ready” jobs. And now he’s suggesting a repeat of the disastrous yacht tax, but this time on aircraft.

    If this passes, get ready for the destruction of the private jet industry and the 1.2 million people it employs. Like yachts, people and corporations can defer the purchase of a plane, or decide not to buy one altogether.

    I don’t know if Obama knows this or if he does know, whether he cares. I suspect he sees it as a campaign talking point useful in portraying Republicans as the party of the rich but which will never be
    enacted into law. If the Republicans were bloody minded enough, they might be tempted to go along just to see the corporate jet business crash and burn as the result of the Obama tax and use it as an election issue. An added benefit would be to hurt GE – a huge jet engine manufacturer – whose chairman, Jeff Immelt, is a major Obama backer. It could be a win-win.

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    You’re absolutely right, the Yacht Tax didn’t work then, and the Democrats have to know this version won’t work any better, and in fact will probably be worse. The economy under HW was bad, but nothing like today. Democrats don’t care about fixing the economy, all they care about is working their base up into a lather of hatred against the rich so they can continue to funnel more money and power to the unions and the activist groups that really call the shots. Then if the business communities refuse to hire they can sick some regulatory agency on them. And if they can regain control of Congress they can have Henry Waxman call them up before his committee to rake them over the coals and hit them with more sanctions. Can there be any doubt what it would be like if they had total control?

  • Tim Jamison

    Call the Democrats bluff. Agree to end any corporate tax breaks that they propose, so long as they support budget cuts.

    Make a big speech about bipartisanship. This would serve to neutralize their only talking point.

    Force them to put specific items on the table so that the CBO will have something to analyze other than speeches.

  • Anonymous

    Nitwit

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