On Friday night’s “Real Time”, Bill Maher rolled out a New Rule. He pointed to the outcome of the Casey Anthony trial and said, “If you can look at a crime where everything points to one answer and not see it, you’re a dumbass. And if you can look at the deficit and not see that the problem is that the rich stopped paying taxes, you’re a Republican.”
He goes on to discuss the fact that our country’s laws are getting rewritten every day to make the lives of the wealthy “just a little bit cushier”. The wealthy, he says, are like some exotic animal that everyone tiptoes around. We mustn’t scare them or they’ll fly away. We want them to “nest here and lay their magic eggs full of jobs”, which, Maher says, “never hatch”.
“Yes, Republican base,” he says, “you are just like that jury. It is pathetically clear who’s killing the middle class, but you keep letting them get away with murder.”
Watch the video, embedded via Mediaite, below:
Strictly speaking, you don’t need the jury comparison to understand Maher’s point, which is that the U.S. deficit can be tied directly to low or non-existent taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and the Republicans’ Jonestown-like obsession with perpetuating that at the expense of … well, virtually everything else. But it’s a worthwhile comparison in that it sets up a great, snarky punch line.
Not that there are lessons for Canada in this or anything.