Molt Be Blog

    Last night R and I were across the street from her parents at their neighbor's house b/c she had asked us to walk her dogs while she went to NYC for the day. Apparently, she "was going to go to Portugal from NY [for work] on Sunday morning, but decided that [she] really just needed to relax and would instead just go to Germany on Monday instead of flying there from Portugal." So she just got her hair cut in NYC and then flew home. R later explained that she had been flying to Portugal from New York (rather than DC) so that she could get her hair done there.
    Conversation progressed to something about voting for Kerry and it unsurprisingly came out that this neighbor who lives in a 1/2 million dollar home by herself, drives a BMW 5 series (it's nice) and travels internationally every week for business, is a republican. She said that this year she isn't sure if she'll vote for Bush again and that it really "depends on this war." I never did figure out what she meant by that. How could it get any worse? She did mention that, much like Vietnam, these soldiers and Iraqis appeared to be dying for no reason. I gave in my two cents about how Bush had an agenda concerning Iraq before he even took office and that half of the people surrounding him were members of PNAC and had been planning to "democraticize" the middle east (i.e. make them friendlier to us to facilitate easier access to oil) since the first Bush administration. That there were no WMDs or Al Qaeda links and that the senate committee on the war had just said so. She thought that Bush didn't know that he was being given bad intelligence. I said that if we were just going on intelligence we should have been trying to stop ethnic cleansing in Darfur and the Balkans, or even, God forbid, discouraging North Korea from building Nuclear Weapons (instead of pulling our troops out of South Korea to go fight in Iraq).
    Then out came a few statements that just knocked me over.
"Well, I just can't see voting for Kerry. I'm afraid of Kerry. He's one of these Massachusetts liberals!"
"'Massachusetts liberal?" I said, "I don't understand. I know plenty of conservatives and independents from Massachusetts. And what's wrong with Kennedy?"
"Who?"
"You know, Kennedy, the other senator from Massachusetts? He's a liberal, too."
"Oh, I don't pay much attention to these things."
"Arrgggg."
"Well, I just know that this Kerry is going to raise taxes. We are taxed to death in this country!"
"Um... I really don't think we're taxed to death in this country," I said, "and besides, if Kerry did raise taxes it wouldn't be for me or you, it would be for the people making billions of dollars a year. He would pretty much raise taxes for those that could afford to pay higher taxes. And also, even if did effect us, Europeans pay taxes at rates of 45%, where our highest tax brackets only get up to between 33-35%."
"That's not true," says neighbor, "He would set a bar at $100,000 or $200,000 and people above that would start having to pay. There are people who have decent jobs and make money, but because of taxes are just scraping by."
    At this point I started to get a bit to angry. Was she talking about herself when she said "just scraping by"? What the hell is her idea of being "taxed to death"? She must have a different concept of death. Her cleaning lady was in the kitchen! She had just flown to New York for the day to have her hair cut!
    R and I left... Seething. The only possible explanation for neighbor-lady to have thought these things is some newsletter she probably gets in the mail every week for having donated to the Republican party at some point in her life. The rhetoric spilling out of her brain was almost visible.
    The reason that we "taxed to death" in this country is that the taxes all go to $200 billion unnecessary wars and missle defense programs to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missles that terrorists could never get theit hands on in the first place where the health care "system" receives none.