About As Bright As A Potted Plant

Because the Winger mindset is that everything political must be motivated by the unending desire to win more power, the only possible explanation of the "horrifying" exchange between the President and a Google employee named Doug Edwards at yesterday's LinkedIn town hall in Silicon Valley where Edwards asked the President to raise his taxes is that the employee had to be an obvious plant in the audience.

Oh, liberals gushed when a rich audience member asked Obama that question today. It seems relevant to point out that this rich liberal is Doug Edwards from the Obama-friendly and regulation-friendly Google.

Edwards has given $300,000 to politicians since 2000 -- every single dime to Democrats. He specifically said he wanted his higher taxes to cover Pell Grants.

Oh, the abject horror of that!  The wingers are in full poutrage mode this morning, with FOX Nation calling Evans a plant and Malkin shrieking about President Obama possibly doing something Bush 43 did for eight years without a peep out of her.

The Right's position on taxes is that every successful businessperson in the country succeeded in spite of them, not because of services and programs funded by them.  The fact that Massachusetts Dem Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren dared to call out conservatives on this has clearly struck one hell of a nerve, and the President took up Warren's argument yesterday at the town hall event.  Greg Sargent:

Conservatives have offered a number of responses to this argument. Some have insisted that if wealthy people like Buffett and the former Google exec want to pay higher taxes, by God, they should go ahead and pay higher taxes. But this badly misses the point: These men are making an argument about the imperative that their whole income group do more to help solve our fiscal mess, not just about their own desire to chip in more themselves. 

And that's what the modern GOP can't comprehend, the notion that with great wealth in society and the power and freedom that wealth brings there comes responsibility to help maintain that society.  Since as I mentioned before the only possible motivation in the GOP worldview is self-aggrandizement and the relentless pursuit of more wealth, it's simply a foreign concept to many of them.

It all comes down to whether or not you believe society's wealthy should work to make the system capable of producing more like themselves, or to do everything they can to produce fewer so that wealth stays with those who have it, and by dint of possession are those most capable and worthy of having it by making sure it's not "malinvested" with the unwashed, unworthy masses.

Or, as the joke goes, American exceptionalism means a bunch of people who were born on third base in life believing they got there because they hit a triple.