David Sirota: Raising taxes isn’t “left-wing radical”!
A controversial Times column is just the latest example of special interests' Orwellian grip on political discourse
During the debate about President Obama’s proposal to let tiny bit of the those tax cuts expire, most reporters did exactly what Businessweek’s Joshua Green did: they pretended that letting Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000 would deny “the rich” any tax cuts whatsoever. This, of course, was demonstrably untrue, as the Obama proposal’s extension of tax cuts for all income below $250,000 still would have given the rich a big tax cut on their first $250,000 of income.
Despite that reality, however, the biased framing persisted. Indeed, wealthy reporters, campaign contributor-appeasing politicians and corporate lobbyists – motivated by both personal financial self-interest and by Beltway groupthink/pack psychology – kept portraying Obama’s proposal as something it was not. That ultimately confused many voters and helped make the final agreement both more conservative and even less reflective of mainstream public opinion. Specifically, the lie that those making more than $250,000 would receive no tax cuts made Obama’s whole proposal look too radical, thus laying the rhetorical groundwork for extending the Bush tax cuts for all income below $400,000, in the process re-imagining that stratospheric income level as somehow “middle class.”
That doesn’t mean there is one one lonely Rasputin pulling all the strings, nor does it mean there is a grand linguistic conspiracy run by a handful wordsmiths in a smoky back room (though said wordsmiths do certainly exist on K Street and in political consulting firms). Rather, it means that the political vocabulary has been so skewed for so long that many who speak the language don’t even know that they are forwarding subjective and often wildly inaccurate assumptions. It also means that it is no coincidence that those particular assumptions at once serve the interests of those with money and ignore the interests of We the People.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/raising_taxes_isnt_left_wing_radical/
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understating reality. 
Blame them or ourselves for not seeing it coming. And...where do we hit them?
rule: Dems are mostly unwilling to press anything meaningful that Repugs object to. Another example: when a 2009 DHS report identifying domestic right-wing extremist groups as posing the greatest threat to America, its people and government, an even greater threat than posed by Islamic extremist groups, was released, Congressional Repugs went totally ape-shit and that issue went away. I suspect little has hereinafter been done to counter that threat considered greater than the threat posed by Islamic extremist groups, but Repugs have no problem with expending $100s of billions annually to thwart the Islamic extremist threat and don't even acknowledge the other threat 'cause, imo, they are a part of that threat. A third example is failure to have pushed for some reasonable gun control legislation, but that would have gone no where 'cause Repugs would have blocked any such heretical nonsense. 
the whole system is sinking in corruption. 
