Remember Kansas!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Last week, several days before the FBI visited Mar-a-Lago, the Republican Party was frantically trying to focus the American public on some topic other than abortion.  On Tuesday, August 2nd, more than sixty percent of voting Kansans had defeated a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have made it easier for Kansas politicians to curtail or outlaw abortion services - and because Kansas is generally a reliably red state, the defeat of the amendment was seen as a harbinger of bad news for the anti-abortion movement and its cheerleaders, the Republican Party.

The national GOP wanted to change the topic of conversation - badly - and before the week was out the party hierarchy coughed up one of its more reliable boogeymen, the Internal Revenue Service.  New government funding was going to allow the hugely understaffed agency to hire 87,000 new field agents to help process claims and ferret out fraud.

The Republican Party falsely claimed that the new agents would be focused on terrorizing middle class taxpayers, and they set their office holders and friends in the right-wing media to singing that tune.  And while those claims were quickly denied by the head of the IRS as not based in fact, one very real aim of the revitalized agency was being publicly ignored:  to go after wealthy tax cheats and large corporations that under-paid or didn't pay their taxes.   More agents would also allow for better monitoring of the activities of organizations claiming tax exemptions due to religious or charitable functions.

In other words, more IRS agents were a legitimate concern to the Republican Party because they would be problematic for the GOP's big corporate donors and political groups based in religious organizations - but they would pose no threat at all to honest, hard-working taxpayers.

It was just stuff to rile up the base and get the focus off of abortion.

Then the FBI (which is headed by a Republican appointed by Trump) got a search warrant (from a Republican judge appointed by Trump) and headed to Mar-a-Lago, and the narrative changed again.  And later today the "victim" of Mar-a-Lago will be dealt one more victim card when he flies off to New York and is deposed in a civil investigation that is looking into his financial dealings of his business operations, a deposition that he has been actively avoiding for months - and another news cycle will kick into gear.

I've got a Speed Queen washer that doesn't cycle that fast!

November is coming.  Forget the noise and remember Kansas!