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Celebrate Owners Day Weekend with the GOP. I received this email:

Dear Skimble,

As we celebrate with our friends and family this [Labor Day] weekend, let us be thankful for the small business owners throughout the country who are the engine of our economy.[1] With over 22.9 million small businesses across the country, they provide approximately 75 percent of the net new jobs added to the economy.[2] The President understands that when small business owners can keep more of their money, they are going to reinvest it in their businesses.[3] With the ability to update or expand, small-business owners will hire more employees, give raises to the employees they have, buy new equipment or invest in advertising.[4] The hard work of small business owners and their entrepreneurial vision creates jobs and helps to stimulate our economy.[5]

In celebration of their vision and our shared Republican ideals, let's renew our commitment to America[6] this weekend.[7]

[...]

Sincerely,

Ed Gillespie
Chairman
Republican National Committee

Our annotation:

[1] Small business is certainly not the engine of the Bush campaigns, which depend on the generosity of — and expected reciprocal generosity in favor of — big, not small, businesses.

[2] Bush has the worst job creation record since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression era administration.

[3] I can speak to this one from personal experience as a small business owner. Any extra money scraped together will be allocated to skyrocketing medical insurance premiums, thanks to the total lack of a sensible medical care policy for American citizens — another GOP failure.

[4] Hire? Raises? Equipment? Advertising? I don't think so. See #3. Also, advertising is increasingly only for insiders, thanks to a media cabal controlled by a handful of boards of directors.

[5] Recent economic stimulus has been attributable to dramatic increases in defense spending, hardly the normal playing field for small businesses, except possibly one of Halliburton's Canadian suppliers called HEAT.

[6] It will be difficult for Republicans to renew their patriotic commitment to the sacrifices made by the Small Businesses of America since the party has outsourced its fundraising telemarketing efforts not to Indiana, but to India.

[7] None of this letter (including the edited portion) is about laborers — the point of Labor Day, which originally commemorated the effort, opposed by big business owners, to limit employment to the 8-hour work day at a time when 12 or 16 hours of work per day was the norm. For the party of ownership and big business, "shared Republican ideals" naturally refer to employers' opposition to the 8-hour work day — the celebration of a holiday weekend in an alternate GOP universe: an anti-Labor Day.

We're getting so used to the Republican party meaning the exact opposite of what it says that no one is even fazed any more. The propaganda is so chock full of nonsequiturs that criticism has nowhere to begin its work. What comes out of the mouths of leadership is uniformly expected to be utter self-serving nonsense.

In other words, America under Bush II has become the Soviet Union.

Happy Labor Day.

UPDATE: Looks like Matt Singer at Not Geniuses got the same letter.

{ 2:27 PM }

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