Winners and Losers in Last Night's Maddow Debacle

Let's say the obvious first: By dramatically revealing that Trump had paid an effective tax rate of 25%, $38 million in tax on $150 million in income, Rachel Maddow embarrassed herself, and the media, and even managed to make Hillary Clinton look like an even bigger liar than we already thought she was.

Remember this old Hillary Clinton attack line?

This was soon after the New York Times revealed that due to huge, huge losses in one year, Trump could carry over those losses for 15 or so years, so he "might" have paid no taxes in the interim.

Well, $38 million in one year is more than $0. I'm no professional fact-checker, but I believe this makes Hillary Clinton a big fat liar.

It was so bad that Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton's former spokesman, had to admit... this was nothing at all, and then had to start changing the subject to other matters:

Even the squawking gigantic socialist emu Sally Kohn had to admit this was a "nothingburger:"

But don't worry; she rallied and said a bunch of stupid things later. We'll get to those.

MSNBC's sister network, CNBC, had to admit that Rachel Maddow had done a big favor to Trump.

They tweeted that story out, but then I guess management decided to suppress the truth so they deleted the Tweet. Left the story, but stopped advertising it.

They did later put it back out -- only after they clarified this was just an op-ed, not a fact or anything.

Now, a little more before, obviously, the usual nutters -- the Blue Checkmark Mafia and the NeverTrump bitter-ender fake conservatives -- were ejaculating stupid all over themselves in anticipation.

Like...

That retard Jason Leopold who got all yelley with Martha McCallum yesterday about his stupid mockumentary about St. Michael Brown of the Low-Quality Dimebag...

Like The Rick Wilson:

Like Rosie O'Donnell, though she did later pick up on the fact that she had been led into a Snipe Hunt inside Al Capone's Vaults:

Anyway, many expressed deflation similar to Rosie afterwards.

A few intrepid souls, however, tried to polish this very mushy turd.

Sally Kohn attempted to lock herself in the Radiation Chamber to save her Captain Rachel Maddow by saying this stupid thing:

First of all, she claims to be a lawyer.

If she were any kind of real lawyer, or even someone borderline fluent in policy, or someone making $100,000 or more, she would know the Alternative Minimum Tax is an additional tax assessed when the actual income tax you owe, once deductions have been taken, fall below a certain level. The point of the tax was to keep billionaires from structuring their income in various tricky ways to pay little tax.

Trump actually had a low income tax liability -- remember, he actually could take those big carryover losses from his bad years -- plus depreciation on his construction equipment, etc.

So his actual owed tax was 4% of his $150 million. But in swoops the Alternative Minimum Tax to come in and say, "No way buddy. You're paying 20.7% more than that, because 4% is so low."

Anyone who's in law and policy -- or who makes enough money to get hit by the AMT ( and more and more people do -- it's called a Hidden Yearly Tax Hike, because the income level you hit it at hasn't been updated in decades, and so more and more people get hit with it even though in real dollars they're making less money than the tax was initially targeted to kick in at) -- knows this, knows what the AMT is, and knows it's a real tax. Donald Trump paid it.

This is all news to squawking gigantic socialist emu Sally Kohn, who thinks if you pay 20.7% in the AMT on top of the 4% in actual tax liability you're... I don't know. Not really paying the 20.7%? Like it's just an imaginary thing? Like you pay it in Fake Dollars?

This is pig-ignorant, and anyone saying something so catastrophically stupid should be barred from making any commentary on any public issue.

Our media, which pretends to know all that needs knowing, spoke of the AMT as if they were attempting to translate those stupid circles the heptapods kept making in Arrival:

The "so-called thing which anyone who is barely fluent in policy already knows about."

That guy's a Daily Beast "journalist," by the way.

This guy answered thus:

Old pal Andy had this point -- if our Media Elites are as Elite as they claim, how the hell don't they know about the AMT? Aren't they already paying it themselves, as many upper-middle class earners are?

Maybe appearing as a Designated Idiot on TV doesn't pay as much as I thought it might.

By the way, people don't even call this the Alternative Minimum Tax, and certainly not the "so-called Alternative Minimum Tax." They just call it the AMT, because everyone knows what it is. Or anyone who knows shit about taxes does, anyway.

This is like saying "the so-called '1040 form'" or "the so-called 'taxable income.'"

Or like saying, "Trump paid 38 million so-called 'dollars.'"

Other people attempted to play the "It's not important this thing we claimed has now been proven false, we should look at this other thing!" card:

I haven't worked out the math, but I'm going to guess that a guy with $10 billion in total assets should be pulling in more than $150 million a year.

However, this was 2005, not 2016, and many of Trump's holdings in New York rose in value dramatically during that time.

And anyway, this is a pretty bullshit point -- it's not illegal to claim you're worth more money than you are, and most of us already factored in the fact that Trump is a bullshit artist and was probably including the full value of properties he merely only had a percentage interest in.

And anyway further, we all know what the media was looking for here: Proof that Trump paid no taxes, or took a deduction for $17 million for "Kompromat payoffs to Vlad" and "Business Entertainment Expenses for Business Entertainment Hookers With Really Big Tits and Really Small Bladders."

For Kurt Eichenwald to claim that this is the real story that everyone should be focusing on... well, who knows, maybe someone sent him an animated gif tonight and scrambled his noggins.

Finally, one more embarrassment. Remember that kid whose ass-cheeks Emillio Estevez duct-taped in the Breakfast Club? Yeah that kid -- he's got his own shoe on MSNBC, and he's called Chris Hayes.

He tried to defend his Partner in Stupid Rachel Maddow by attempting to use some young-people slang to snark at Maddow's critics.

It's very unfortunate when 40-somethings attempt to use the venacular of 15 year olds which is now officially dated -- and you can tell it's dated, because Chris Hayes is using it:

Hey that tweet is straight fire, bae. You get jiggy widdit and keep writin' those phat (with a ph) words, ya feel me homeslice?

posted by Ace at 09:30 AM

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