It’s too early to tell if Richard Mourdock is going to present Democrats with the gift of a United States Senate seat. But like 2010 Senate candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, he does seem determined to keep giving us all a clear glimpse into the wingnut id.
Yesterday we had Mourdock’s pithy thoughts defining “bipartisanship” as a simple matter of Democrats surrendering to Republicans.
Now Think Progress has run across a video of Mourdock at a town hall meeting recently expounding on the Lucky Ducky Meme–you know, the habit of conservatives to compound their demands for lower income tax rates on the wealthy with complaints that poor people often don’t pay income taxes at all (just regressive payroll and state/local taxes on their meagre incomes).
Nothing new about that, except for the analogy Mourdock chose for brave pols like himself who are willing to stand up for Big Business against Big Poor. Travis Waldron explains:
The Republican Party’s nominee for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat recently compared the fight over tax rates and reform to former president Abraham Lincoln’s concern over slavery, alluding to Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech ahead of the Civil War….
“MOURDOCK: What he meant by that was that slavery was either going to be totally eliminated from the United States or it was no longer just going to be restricted to the Southern states, it was going to go everywhere. I am here to suggest to you that we are in a house divided. You know this past April, when our federal taxes were paid, 47 percent — 47 percent — of all American households paid no income tax. In fact, half of that 47 percent almost, actually got tax money back from the government that they never paid — because a few years ago we revised the welfare program to make it part of the tax code. When 47 percent are paying no income taxes — they do pay Social Security — but they are not paying income taxes, and 53 percent are carrying the load, we are a house divided.”
Hoo boy! Aside from the great historical and moral insight that leads Mourdock to compare the antebellum Slave Power to people with no power at all, you do have to wonder if he’s suggesting another Civil War may prove necessary to crush the Rebellion against the rights of the better-off to fully enjoy the fruits of their labor, their capital gains, their inheritances, and their own government benefits without having to share any of them with those people. Hell, isn’t it enough that those people were the beneficiaries of the first Civil War, earning the precious right to earn their own wealth as sharecroppers? No wonder there’s a Tea Party Movement!
