Saturday, October 27, 2007

Broken Promises

Over the past several weeks, Charlie Sykes has been leading every segment of his show with an audio of Governor Jim Doyle saying:

Going forward, my mind will be open to every solution -- except one. We should not -- we must not -- and I will not -- raise taxes. Wisconsin's problem is not that we tax too little. It is that we spend too much.


This was picked up and parroted by almost everyone on the right, from PaddyMac to McBride to various bloggers. There is just one problem with this. They make it seem like Doyle made this statement recently, say, as a campaign promise in last year's election.

In reality, it came from his 2003 State of the State Address. Even the slowest on the right should have figured out that was almost five years ago. But no. They still use it to hammer on Doyle as they carp about the 2007-9 budget. They complain about how high taxes are going to be, complete with the obligatory hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing and frothing at the mouth.

Too bad they weren't a little more selective in the speeches they chose. If they raised the same ruckus about the real lies told in 2003, they could have saved the country hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and the integrity of the nation. All they had to do was call out Bush for the lies he told on January 28, 2003 in his State of the Union Address.

But they didn't. They chose to do the "right" thing, instead of the proper thing.

UPDATE: A commenter on McBride's side brought up the fact that the quote that she and others on the right are using was from Doyle's 2003 speech. She and her followers respond with a "So what? He lied other times too," type of response. Again, it is a shame that they choose to focus on the "right" thing, instead of the proper thing, and holding the true liar's feet to the fire.

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