Democracy Has Prevailed.

July 13, 2013

No, HERE'S The Reality

My friends, the braintrust is misleading you.  Again.

This time it's about the sequester:
For all the hand-wringing over the big, bad sequestration, most of the worst fallout predicted by pols never occurred. The Washington Post reminds that prison guards and FBI agents weren't furloughed. Americans didn't get stuck at border crossings. And hundreds of thousands of low-income women and children didn't go hungry.
That last line's an obvious distract because as the Washington Post pointed out last February:
Most mandatory programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, and in particular low-income programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, or welfare) and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) were exempt from the sequester.
Back then, the Post did point out (in the next sentence, by the way) that:
...some low-income programs, most notably aid for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), are subject to cuts.
However when we look at the Post article (or even the Heritage Foundation blog post) the braintrust references we don't find ANY mention of WIC.

Um, so since, say, food stamps were exempt from the sequester, isn't it kinda misleading to imply that the sequester ain't so bad because women and children didn't go hungry because of it?

On the other hand the Washington Post article they reference does point out one of the reasons why the predictions of the Obama administration didn't occur:
So many predictions fell short because, in recent months, the administration and Congress did what was supposed to be impossible: They undid many of sequestration’s scariest reductions. In the process, this supposedly ironclad budget cut — ostensibly immune to political maneuvering — became a symbol of the reality that nothing in Washington is beyond politics.
So some of the details of the sequester have been changed by the Congress and the Administration in reaction to the reality of the budget cuts in order to lessen their impact.  Huh.  So let me ask you: Did you get any indication of that in reading the Braintrust's editorial?

No?  Me neither.

Don't you think it should have been in there, if only to present a clearer picture of reality?

Yea.  Me, too.

Distorting reality for the sake of pushing a political agenda - not much of a surprise, really, coming from the editorial board of the Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review.

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