Sham AIG Outrage Left and Right

Whether or not it gets published, I submitted the following letter to the Editor of the Columbus Dispatch a few minutes ago:

In a letter in the March 24 edition, Mitch Seltzer expressed concern about the proposed 90 percent tax rate bill currently working its way through Congress. While there is ample reason to fear this piece of populist legislation, Mr. Seltzer's conclusion that "It could pave the way to making America a truly socialist state." is completely off the mark.

Like the representatives promoting this bill, Mr. Seltzer is playing politics at the expense of truth.

Those in Congress see an opportunity to gain points with an outraged public by posturing in fraudulent support of an ex post facto law, which they know full well could never survive a constitutional challenge and for which president Obama has expressed opposition.

Mr. Seltzer's warning about the specter of creeping socialism is likewise fraudulent on two accounts.

First, with communism no longer viable as the nebulous, enemy "-ism" needed to keep America in a state of fear and their party in power, the right-wing has made socialism the de rigueur bogeyman.

Second, and more importantly, this bill represents a move not toward socialism, but rather toward direct democracy, a governing philosophy rejected by the Founding Fathers when they established our nation as a republic in the Constitution. That is the true danger inherent in this bill.

Suggesting that a law which would overturn the tenets of representative government and replace them with mob rule is socialistic reveals either ignorance of the meanings of basic political terms or a deliberate attempt to obscure those meanings so that unrelated terms can be used interchangeably to justify any action.

This is not surprising, given that those who now cry "socialism" at every turn are by and large the same folks who believe that the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the policy of extraordinary rendition, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp are splendid examples of American democratic principles in action.