When Up is Down and Down is Up

The MAGAs are still out there pretending that the economy is Biden’s Achilles’ Heel. I harvested this meme from the weekend:

I saw a similar one, which I unfortunately neglected to capture, that wanted everyone to go grocery shopping and fill up the tank before they go to vote.

That one had to be old… I agree with it 100%. I think by November, unless Republicans do something to tank the economy in the name of maintaining another avenue for campaign attack ads, the economy will be just fine. Gas prices are always a question mark because so many things can send them shooting up. Production issues, transport issues, war, terrorism, and just plain greed can spike gas prices. And as it’s often said, gas prices go up like a rocket and come back down like a feather.

I think Democrats need to do a better job at highlighting how the prior inflation rise was primarily due to corporate price gouging rather than the after-effects of the federal COVID stimulus. We need some charts circulating that show how when the inflation was at its peak, so were corporate profits. If the cost of supplies was really the culprit in high prices, profits wouldn’t have been smashing records.

Granted, such presentations are likely to put those who most need to hear them to sleep.

It continues to rankle how Republicans keep trying to compare current gas prices to when COVID had cratered them. All it took for gas to fall under $2.00 was a mishandled pandemic that made people stay home, dried up demand for gas, and caused the deaths of over a million Americans. Although I’m sure they’d take the deal in a second if the dead were solely made up of brown people, gays, and non-Christians.

All the metrics are looking good right now. Wages are up, joblessness is down, and inflation is as low as it was before the pandemic. Polls say people feel they are personally doing well, but still think the overall economy is a disaster. This is 100% the media’s doing, especially the Right Wing Echo Chamber, which pushes the bad news regardless of actual statistics to the contrary. When a Democrat is in power, it’s all bad news, all the time. And mainstream media doesn’t broadcast economic successes nearly as forcefully as they do the preceding failures.

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In other news, Republicans could not look worse on The Border than they do right now, what with the Senate taking orders from TFG to tank a bipartisan bill to address the southern border so that he (and the rest of the party) can run on the immigration chaos for this year’s elections. They refuse to take any action that might look like a “win” for President Biden.

Last I’ve seen, they’re pretending that this bill is so terrible, even though their teammates were in on its creation. But in actuality, it’s like I’ve been saying about abortion, election security, and other issues: Republicans don’t really want to address the problem if they can campaign on it. They prevent solutions so they can stoke fear over Democrats’ inaction. That’s page one in the GOP playbook. Democrats need to highlight this practice at every opportunity.

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Lastly, congratulations to E. Jean Carroll, for becoming filthy rich at the expense of TFG. Although I wouldn’t make any big plans, just yet, for how to spend all that dough. It will be a long time before she sees a dime if TFG can do anything about it. I’m sure he’ll pull every delaying tactic available to get avoid paying out, from endless appeals to limited bankruptcy. And when it eventually does come time to pay, I have no doubt he’ll try to draw the money from other people via “loans” he never pays back, or fundraising from his sheep.

E. Jean should also avoid going up in any tall buildings, lest she become another victim of faulty Russian staircase design, wherein that first step is a real killer.