Country First?

During an interview on Good Morning America, while explaining the Obama plan to cut taxes on 95% of Americans while raising them on people making over $250,000, Joe Biden said, “It’s time to be patriotic. Time to jump in. Time to be part of the deal. Time to help get America out of the rut.”

Of course the shameless people from the other ticket took that opportunity to slam Biden.

“To the rest of America that’s not patriotism. Raising taxes is about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse,” said faux hockey mom Ms. Pit Bull Lipstick.

Let's forget for a minute that that is not quite what Joe Biden said and also forget that Obama's tax plan will cut most people's taxes. Basically what Biden was saying was that it is time for the wealthy to step up and pay their fair share in this time of crises, but that wouldn't be attack-able enough for the shameless duo.

But let's address their slam anyway. Why isn't it patriotic? Isn't paying taxes an incredibly patriotic thing to do? Contributing to your country so it can function, so that we can have fire fighters, police officers, school systems, transportation and a national defense seems to me to be an incredibly patriotic thing to do.

And as Jonathan Cohn points out, paying higher taxes during a time of war has always been seen as the patriotic thing to do.

We are at war, are we not Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin?

When exactly did "every man and family for themselves" become the patriotic thing, and helping your country survive and not pass on a huge debt to our children, the unpatriotic thing?

What McCain-Palin are doing is not even shameless.

It's shameful.


Read - Biden and Palin Tussle Over Taxes from the NYT politics blog
Read - Patriotism from Joe Klein at Time