Krauthammer is touting this tax deal as a great win for Obama and the Dems. "Golly", he's saying, "We right wingers really lost one in this round. That Obama–he's a fox."
How magnanimous. That's just the kind of guy Krauthammer is–willing to give credit where credit is due–a sincere, fair-minded, independent thinker. And to think all along I misjudged him as a cynical, right-wing propagandist.
Please.
You must have noticed by now that right-wingers haver perfected a kind of Orwellian up-is-down, black-is-white 'oppositie speak'. They use it to preemptively deflect attention from the crimes they commit by absurdly accusing Liberals or Dems of doing it first or worse. Any time the Right accuses the Left of some malfeasance, it's an infallible indicator of the malfeasance they themselves are commiting. Nothing to see here–look over there. And the Beltway media dutifully does so. It's a tried-and-true tactic from the right-wing propaganda playbook, and this coy Krauthammer ploy is just a variation on the theme. In this case the "crime" is the "swindle", but in Krauthammer's 'opposite-speak' it's the Dems that have effected the swindle.
Krauthammer understands why structural Progressives hate this deal and why the Republicans love it, because he understands the long game that the superwealthy and their Republican surrogates are playing. He wants everyone to think that Obama won this negotiation because it deflects attention from the important long-term structural victory won by the superwealthy Right. Let these liberal losers continue to think of themselves as the winners; they're probably stupid enough, many of them, to believe it.
Krauthammer is patronizing the Dems. He's like Tom Sawyer reminding the not-too-bright neighbor boys he conned about how much fun they had whitewashing his fence for him.
P.S. For another illustration of this Orwellian "opposite-speak", here's Rush Limbaugh, the American prince of cynical, right-wing propaganda, essentially describing his own m.o. by projecting it onto Liberals:
But if you live in the universe of lies, the last thing that you are governed by is the truth. The last thing you are governed by is reality. The only thing that matters to you is the advancement of your political agenda. And you tell yourself in the universe of lies that your agenda is so important the world will not survive without it and therefore you can lie, cheat, steal, destroy whoever you have to to get your agenda done because your opponents are evil, and in fighting evil, anything goes. There are no rules when you're in a fight with the devil.
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