Why is the media more interested in Hillary's email than in Jeb's profoundly dishonest tax pitch?
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9300871/jeb-bush-tax-plan
The formative experience of my political life was the 2000 presidential campaign, in which the media mercilessly persecuted Al Gore over a series of trivial exaggerations and now-forgotten pseudo-scandals while giving George W. Bush a pass on the fact that the central premises of his economic agenda were lies.
People too young to remember the campaign may wonder how Bush persuaded the country that budget-busting tax cuts for the richest Americans were the prescription the country needed. The answer is that he simply misdescribed his plan. In speeches, in televised debates, and in advertisements he represented his plan as
consistent with a continued budget surplus and as primarily benefiting middle-class taxpayers.
Bush won the election and enacted
hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts.
Surpluses turned into deficits, and the
promised economic boom never materialized.
None of this was surprising or unpredictable to anyone who cared to dig into the details. The problem was political reporters had found those details much less interesting than snarking about Al Gore's wooden speaking style and complaining that his
"demeanor" was disrespectful during a debate exchange in which Bush repeatedly attacked Gore with bogus math.
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