Letting the Bush tax cuts expire isn’t raising taxes. It’s allowing an artificial lowering of them to expire.

The whole reason these tax cuts will expire at all was that Bush and a Republican-led congress used the legislative process of called “reconciliation” to get them passed without full scrutiny. By using this political dodge, the cuts were able to be passed on a simple majority, yet avoided the possibility of discussion, amendments, or even a filibuster. They were never permanent.

If a store has a sale, the return of prices to their normal level after the sale is not called a “price hike.” It’s well understood by shoppers everywhere that temporary pricings are just that—temporary. So if Bush offers a limited-time-only sale on money and the price reverts to its normal level afterward, that’s not Obama’s doing. Yet if the tax cuts expire, it’s being spun as if it will be Obama’s tax hike.

If Bush had wanted it permanent, he could have used a different process. Of course, that would have engaged a much needed discussion of whether we wanted the outrageous cost of what he was offering. It didn’t come for free then either. If we’d had such a discussion then, the tax cuts might never have gone in because the price tag might have been hard for the Republicans, the self-proclaimed keepers of fiscal responsibility, to admit out loud.

This is no small matter either because we’re hearing phrases like “we mustn’t raise taxes at this critical time” as justification for continuing the cuts. How different would the discussion be if it were reported as “we mustn’t finally force a discussion about massive spending that we were never allowed to have”?

The Republicans claim they’re all about forcing discussions on out-of-control spending. If they were serious about this claim, you’d think they’d be keen on having this one dusted off and presented for proper scrutiny. They’re not serious about the claim, of course.

It’s lamentable but understandable that the Republicans would try to spin things to make it look like suddenly, out of the blue, President Obama might want to just push taxes upwards on the rich for no good reason. It’s not a reasonable summary of the situation, but it is a summary that is within the selfish interests of the Republicans to offer. So I can see why they do it. But why don’t the Democrats call them on it? Are they asleep?

And why do reporters never correct things unless a concerted effort is made by the Democrats to counter it? An objective standard of how to report the news doesn’t mean that if a bully beats someone up and the person being beaten up doesn’t complain, you accept the bully’s word that “he was asking for it” because that word is unchallenged.

Unchallenged bias is not neutral reporting. It’s just lazy reporting.

Perhaps for lack of budget, perhaps out of simple laziness, the media seems to have outsourced the checking of facts and sometimes even common sense to others. There’s little evidence of dynamic critical thought.

Stories are no longer about the war, the economy or jobs. There’s been a subtle shift to where stories are all about what so-and-so said about the war, the economy, or jobs. So many reporters seem clueless about the actual topics under discussion, and so all they can do is relentlessly cite who said what. It’s as if the reporters think every discussion comes down to the competing opinions of politicians in a world devoid of fact.

Reporters have reduced themselves to mindless ’bots responsible for one-way delivery of propaganda. And in the process, any hope of public dialog with politicians is lost. Rather than acting in their most useful role as loyal gadflies, they have acquiesced in becoming the final insulating layer that keeps the politicians safe from answering to the people.