Officially “Backwards Day” is January 31 but I think the papers didn’t get the memo.
This is a guest opinion in the NYTimes by Margaret Atwood.
I read the entire thing and wondered if I had woken up yet.
It’s about humans and debt and fairness. How if you don’t pay your debts the other guy gets upset. The “fairness” of the universe becomes out of whack. I don’t disagree. We’re always doing mental calculations of who owes what to whom and how.
But this is her ending.
If fair regulations are established and credibility is restored, people will stop walking around in a daze, roll up their sleeves and start picking up the pieces. Things unconnected with money will be valued more — friends, family, a walk in the woods. “I” will be spoken less, “we” will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as the common good.
She never says that she thinks fair regulations are not established, except maybe in that word “restored”. She doesn’t say when they were in existence. She doesn’t notice how being fair then makes a person more of a “we” than and “I”. This comes out of the blue. Backwards like.
Weird.
Then there was this column by Ruth Marcus accusing McCain/Palin of turning nasty by noting Obama’s socialist tendencies. But here’s what she says:
The candidates have different visions about the proper role of government; these are fair, and important, grounds for debate. ….
And, yes, all hard-fought elections turn nasty, despite the best intentions of the candidates. But for all the hand-wringing over Swift-boating in 2004, those charges came from an outside group, not the candidate they sought to benefit, and went to John Kerry’s character, not the legitimacy of his governing philosophy.
How does talking about a candidate’s socialist tendencies turn into a “character” attack vs a policy attack? Seriously…am I awake yet?
And for a bonus, we have Ruth straightening out any thoughts you have on Obama’s tax cut.
When McCain inveighs against Obama’s plan to give tax credits to “those who pay none,” he ignores the fact that the 40 percent who do not owe income tax still have 7.65 percent taken out in payroll taxes.
We’ll return to the Wall Street Journal here where it’s explained that the payroll taxes which normally go into Social Security will not actually be refunded or that would hurt social security. Say again?
Wake me up when Backwards Day is over.
