Fact-Checking Sarah Palin Is a Waste of Everyone's Time, But Fuck It:
Sigh. This is getting repetitive, isn't it? Yeah, it's still fun, but, Christ, there's only so many times you can do it. But let's see if we can get it up for one more sore, exhausted fuck before we have to go back to doing real work.

Here's Sarah Palin on Rush Limbaugh's House of Donuts (Glazed and Ass) yesterday: "Let's go back to what Reagan did in the early eighties and stay committed to those commonsense free market principles that worked. He faced a tougher recession than what we're facing today. He cut those taxes, ramped up industry, and we pulled out of that recession. We need to revisit that."

Beyond the fact that this recession is worse than what Reagan faced in the early 1980s, he raised taxes multiple times. Fuck, when he was governor of California and facing the first deficit in that's state history, "Reagan ended up approving a $1-billion tax increase on a $6-billion annual budget, which was, proportionately, the biggest tax increase in state history."

And while Reagan did slash the fuck out of taxes on the wealthy, thus ensuring our path to economic doom, he also raised taxes multiple times. In 1982, he rolled back some of the tax cuts passed in 1981, which, in today's political rhetoric, would be "Holy fuck, Ronald Reagan is gutting your incomes like a shank-carrying white supremacist in a prison race riot." That would have been the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act. Notice that. "Fiscal responsibility" meant for the right wing's great god Gipper that one might have to raise taxes. It was "the largest peacetime tax increase in American history," as Reagan and Bush the Smarter adviser Bruce Bartlett put it.

Reagan raised payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare in 1983. Says Bartlett in a 2003 article for the National Review, "This is a tax increase that lives with us still, since it initiated automatic increases in the taxable wage base. As a consequence, those with moderately high earnings see their payroll taxes rise every single year." Yeah, Reagan raised taxes just about every year he was president, with the 1984 Deficit Reduction Act (again, notice that title), and more in 1985, 1986, and 1987. Of course, most of these tax increases affected the middle class since the wealthy had had their taxes sliced to bits in 1981 while the trickle down from that act never happened.

By the way, he signed a gas tax hike in 1983. It was something Reagan wanted in order to, you know, pay for stupid shit like roads and bridges. For some reason, it seemed reasonably conservative then to say that people who use the fucking roads ought to pay for their upkeep, which would created tens of thousands of jobs. So he more than doubled the federal gas tax.

Of course, Reagan also dropped coin like a drunken sailor at a Shanghai whorehouse that takes credit cards, sending the deficit into the stratosphere with defense spending. So at least by raising taxes, he didn't completely wreck the economic train, but he sure as fuck built the track and pulled switch. It would take George W. Bush's Palin-esque understanding of economics to send us careening off the bridge.

Other crap dropped out of Palin's mouth in her talk with Limbaugh, who took each one of those mouthturds and saved them to mold and then kiln dry to create a perfectly-shaped shit dildo to fuck his ass with later. Said Palin about the GOP, "You know another key to this, too, is to not hesitate duking it out within the party. This is what I appreciate about the Republican Party. We have contested, aggressive, competitive primaries. We're not like this herd mentality like a bunch of sheep -- with the fighting instincts of sheep, as Horowitz would say -- like some in the Democrat Party."

Putting aside her quoting David Horowitz, did Palin even realize that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran against each other for an endless, divisive battle while McCain pretty much just cruised to the inevitability of his nomination?

And on climate change, "I think there's a lot of snake oil science involved in that and somebody's making a whole lot of money off people's fears that the world is... It's kind of tough to figure out with the shady science right now, what are we supposed to be doing right now with our climate." Goddamn all those shady scientists making the megabucks off the solar panel industry while the poor oil executives just sit there, wondering when their pay off will come, wondering if anyone will listen to them.

Yesterday, in a bookstore here in a very red town in the middle of Tennessee, the Rude Pundit stood aghast by a table stacked with Palin's book. It reads like a passive-aggressive Rick Warren tome, where the message is that you can self-actualize through Jesus if all those fuckers holding you back get out of the way. Two or three people grabbed copies and headed towards the cash register. People are lined up for hours to meet her in Michigan today. In the end, the facts of the the book don't matter. All that matters is that idiot America has its queen.

Tomorrow: for fuck's sake, something else.