Your new lies

There's got to be a sort of sad realization about your life when you realize that all you do is take large sums of corporate money to help politicians find the best poll-tested ways to lie about something hat could benefit Americans. But such is the life of Frank Luntz. First he partnered up with health giants and the GOP to take on health care, but with Democrats willingly giving up that fight the new battlefront is financial reform.

And because not enough House members and Senators are completely owned by the banking and finance lobby, he's devised a series of dishonest new talking points that will soon drive you crazy with the repetitive frequency with which you hear them and by the sheer, ball out dishonesty of them. Here are the words he advises be used by people seeking to kill any financial reform. Because doing things as they've been done for the past decade is the only way forward.

ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY & OVERSIGHT, LOBBYIST LOOPHOLES, ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT LAWS, BUREAUCRATS, WASTEFUL WASHINGTON SPENDING, NEVER AGAIN, GOVERNMENT FAILURES AND INCOMPETENCE, LET’S HELP SMALL BUSINESSES, BIG BANK BAILOUT BILL, BLOATED BUREACRACY, FINE PRINT, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, SPECIAL INTERESTS, HARD WORKING TAXPAYERS, ANOTHER WASHINGTON AGENCY, UNLIMITED REGUATORY POWERS, DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS, RED TAPE

Bold print for bold words. Some of them are also an alliterative delight. We'll ignore the spelling errors on 'bureaucracy' and 'regulatory', because who cares about spelling if you aren't going to care about basic truth? Yes, that's right, a bill which intends to put new restrictions of credit card companies, banks, financial institutions, mortgage companies, and all the other groups that shitted the world economy and provide new protections to consumers is going to be attacked as something that will “punish taxpayers" while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.” Creating a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which smart people like Elizabeth Warren feel is absolutely integral to getting real reform and real protection for citizens, is creating an “unaccountable czar.”

Just like health reform, where anything and everything that could conceivably be proposed was going to be knocked as a socialist government takeover/Bolshevik plot, anything that attempts to look at the last few years, the state of the economy, and effect it has had on the country and go "Hey, wait a minute, maybe we should do something" is going to get accused of bailing banks out and stealing taxpayer money to give to Goldman-Sachs. So a quick round of applause for men like Frank Luntz and the country we live in that enables their cheap bullshit. I know you probably didn't have high hopes for financial reform, I didn't either, but you really need to lower those hopes. A lot.