Maddow Abruptly More Receptive to Tax Cuts During Wartime
Nice to see Rachel Maddow come around on this. Maddow has pontificated lately that tax cuts during wartime are not only ineffective but immoral — which makes her inexplicable change of heart all the more puzzling. (video after page break) Here's Maddow during her Aug. 23 appearance on the David Letterman show to plug her upcoming documentary, “Day of Destruction, Decade of War,” its very title suggestive of a disproportionate American response to the enormity of 9/11 — At the same time we've been fighting two of the country's longest wars ever simultaneously while getting tax cuts. We doubled the nation's defense budget and took tax cuts at the same time. And that's, that's the kind of thing you wouldn't even try to sell to a country unless you were going to be pretty sure that the country wasn't going to feel like it was at war. … The question though is what we're going to do now. I mean, are we going to keeep staying at war permanently? Or do our wars ever end? And are we ever going to start paying for it? You can't have wars and tax cuts simultaneously. Maddow followed this with more along the same lines on her MSNBC show Sept. 6 when she described the first round of Bush tax cuts signed into law in June 2001, three months before 9/11, followed by a second round of cuts in May 2003, two months after the US-led invasion of Iraq. Bush decided against pushing to rescind the tax cuts after the start of both wars, Maddow complained — MADDOW: So 9/11 happened, we kept the Bush tax cuts. We went to war in Afghanistan and we kept the Bush tax cuts. We decided then to stay in Afghanistan even after the fall of the Taliban, we kept the Bush tax cuts. Then in March 2003, after already being engaged in one war, we decided to start another war simultaneously in Iraq. And not only did we keep those Bush tax cuts still, then, but then just two months after starting our second war, two months after invading Iraq, came that single moment at which we divorced ourselves from our history and from our reality. A clip was then shown of the “Today” show's Ann Curry from May 2003 reporting on Bush signing his second round of tax cuts into law — CURRY:
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on September 12, 2011. Filed under