As the Presidential Election of 2008 careens to an end, the party of McPain seems to have zeroed in on one last diabolically desperate attempt to paint Obama as a Socialist, this of course to go along with his unpatriotic, Muslim, domestic terror, anti-white, elitist tendencies: namely, he is a proponent of redistribution of wealth.
The clarion call to those who have yet to make up their minds in this election is that he actually wants to rob you of your money, and give it to those who are far less deserving than yourself. What group of voters, exactly, is this supposed to appeal to? It is the last vestige of fear in a campaign that has borrowed not ninety percent, but one hundred percent from the Bush Administration playbook. Say it ain't so, Joe! Forget about Joe the Plumber, this is Joe Stalin.
The idiocy of this campaign will pave the way for a truly historic outcome: the election of an African-American named Barack Hussein Obama to the Oval Office. For this, I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to these fear mongers. However, the damage done through the use of such tactics, the divisiveness sown by these pseudo-patriots, the resurgence of bigotry and hatred enshrined in the dangerous and reckless use of a strategy designed to segregate the country into good and bad, Christians versus Pagans, white versus all others, will be with us for quite some time and the healing process will be painful. Mercifully it will begin soon.
But back to my original thought about distribution of wealth, the concept is not a new one. In fact, the proposition of a government collecting revenue so that essential needs of society can be addressed is as old as humankind. There is nothing wrong with the concept itself, only its application. There will always be disputes about how much to collect, and how to spread it around. The real issue here is who gets what. In the Bush/McCain world, corporate welfare is good, public welfare is bad. Redistribution of wealth when it is targeted to the wealthy is positive; redistribution of wealth to the poor is negative.
This perverse line of thought is largely responsible for a society where the income gap continues to widen, where the middle-class, a term that has been AWOL from the Republican discourse, and seemingly removed from the Republican dictionary altogether at this juncture, continues to shrink under the weight of wrong-headed and senseless economic and fiscal priorities. Every tax credit deposited at the altar of small business represents redistribution of wealth, every tax dollar devoted to strengthening our military represents redistribution of wealth, every investment in the nation's social and physical infrastructure represents redistribution of wealth.
So the next time your conservative puppets talk about redistribution of wealth as though it were a totally abhor able concept, ask them if they support a strong defense or a strong economy, then tell them the cornerstones to both is a redistributive economic system that creates incentives through investment of tax dollars. There can be no doubt that there are good and bad investments, depending upon your ideological framework, but to merely imply that the concept of redistribution of wealth is inherently evil (read socialistic) is simplistic and absurd. It is symptomatic of the campaign itself, fear is pervasive and paralyzing, hope is focused and liberating. Fear traps us in a time warp; hope opens up a new horizon. Fear is grounded in the certainty of the past; hope allows us to explore the uncertainty of the future. This is what this campaign is all about.