For Harry Reid, the comment was fairly clear: The U.S. economy lost 36,000 jobs in a single month, but it could have been much, much worse.
Of course, Reid didn’t exactly say it that way. Here’s a portion of what he actually said:
[The bill includes] unemployment compensation. Today is a big day in America, only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good. Unemployment rate around America has not changed. Prognosticators thought it would go up. It has not. So we need to extend — there are about 15 million people in America out of work. These extended unemployment benefits will help millions of those people. We were fortunate enough for earlier this week to get the 30-day extension, which saved ‘em so that when we finish this legislation we should finish it, hopefully on Tuesday, we can go to conference with the House and quickly work out our differences.
It was an instant Internet sensation. The “really good” comment — and only that comment — made it to YouTube almost instantly. Republicans slammed Reid for seemingly saying that job loss was a good thing. His political opponents here in Nevada attacked him over it.
And they knew — or should have known — they were taking Reid’s comment completely out of context. That’s politics, but it certainly doesn’t make them right and Reid wrong. Any reasonable person knew instantly what Reid was saying, and that includes most of the Reid-haters who later bashed him with his own words so forcefully that he was later forced to clarify what he was saying.
Now consider another comment about unemployment benefits. This time, the speaker was Nevada’s other senator, John Ensign:
“The more generous the benefit, the easier you make it to stay on unemployment insurance, and the less incentive there is for people to actually go out and do what it takes to get a job,” Ensign said during a pivotal debate in 2003.
And lest you think Ensign has changed his mind since then, he voted this week against the bill to extend benefits.
So, you’d expect some criticism of Ensign’s remarks, right? He’s essentially come out and said that people laid off (through no fault of their own) shouldn’t get the benefits for which their employer has paid taxes. It’s not surprising Ensign isn’t aware (just yet, that is) that unemployment benefits hardly make up for a person’s salary, and that most people on unemployment would gladly trade those checks for a chance at a job. It’s not the money that’s keeping them from work, it’s the economy.
But no. Ensign’s words and vote — despite Nevada’s 12.8 percent unemployment rate — got scant attention. Yet Reid’s remark — easily understood by anybody who’s honest, and far less offensive — drew reams of criticism.
It hardly seems fair, does it?
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Yes, it’s hardly fair, but the Republican Party has this uncanny knack of presenting things to distort the truth, along with this axiom of “Do as I say now, not what I said before that was totally the opposite.”
Their packaging of lies, untruths and distortions have been packaged so that they are relentless, loud, repetitive, a constant media flood, and said as much as possible to rival a north Korean dictator’s best propaganda. And it is all shouted out loud and often and it is also said with vague generalities by using non-sensical buzzwords (like “socialism”) and other words that tone down a negative (like instead of “torture,” use “enhanced interrogation practices”). And it goes on and on and on and on.
Senator Ensign knows this well. So do those people who have an agenda to see Senator Reid get voted out and replaced with someone who will just occupy a bench, vote no along with the other GOoPers and totally disregard the will of their constituents.
But the problem is that people suck up all this fearmongering and seem to welcome it. Because they are afraid and concerned because the economy pretty much went belly up and will take quite a while to recover. And it is far easier to complain rather than fix something. And Nevada is by far the worse off compared with the other 49 States. It will take at least a few years to get back to where we were. Those 2000-2006 years of plentifulness and wealth are way, way over with, and people can only reflect back on those times. Because they are gone.
The Republican Party plays upon fears, concerns and desperation and does their level best to turn it all into votes. They want people to scream and cry to get things fixed now. And there is no possible way those fixes are going to happen that quickly. So, this packaging by the Republicans will continue. Because it’s effective for their needs.
I hope it doesn’t work. We don’t need to go back to that Bush/Cheney/Rove eight dark years era that got us here.
I really hope people see through it before it’s too late. Because this present administration, in my opinion, has done well. And they need to continue. Sure, there have been some mistakes, but they are not big ones. And the progress is seemingly slow and plodding. But we seem to be slowly digging out of a deep hole.
Just my thoughts…
Maybe, just maybe it’s because people are so beat up and let down that they just don’t give a shit.
The Dems were given a breathtaking mandate which they have totally pissed away. Not a single Wall Street fat cat is in jail, there has been no business reform, Harry was so damned busy getting nothing done that he couldn’t even remember to renew the death tax and his Nero-like fiddling for the past year has let the best possible chance of health care reform slip away. Govern damn-it! You had the mandate and completely pissed it away. Now the people are going to take back the power because you abused the trust.
The trouble is; there is no one worthy of the grant. The likes of Ensign, Bunning et al will inherit by default and finish the class war the Republicans started by completing the burial of the working middle class.
Help from the press? That is simply laughable as this post illustrates.