Republicans risk committing “suicide’’ and losing all support if they cave into higher taxes during eleventh-hour fiscal cliff negotiations, Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, says.
“It is suicide for the Republican Party to do this,’’ Bozell, a noted fundraiser for conservative groups fighting media bias and liberal legislation, tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.
Watch the exclusive interview here.
“It’s got to stand for a set of principles and one-by-one it’s been surrendering those principles, whether it’s social issues or foreign policy issues. But their bread and butter has been economic issues: spending and taxation.
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“They have violated their pledge on spending and now they’re going to violate the final pledge which is on taxation. So I don’t know why anybody would support the Republicans after this.’’
In a recent letter to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, Bozell said his involvement with the party will end if a budget deal that raises taxes is passed.
He believes charitable donors as well as small businessmen are being singled out — “demonized by Obama and some Republicans are going along with it.’’
Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer recently said he believes the president’s goal is to use the tax issue to start a civil war among Republicans in order to gain a free hand to dominate Washington, a theory Bozell agrees with.
“He’s spot on right. This tax issue, think about it, it doesn’t do anything to resolve the fiscal mess,’’ Bozell said.
“Politically, it breaks the Republican Party in half, and that’s what the Democrats want, to break the Party in half, which they’ll succeed in doing if the Republicans go along with a tax increase that everyone knows will not fix anything.’’
Meanwhile, the media is “waiving pom-poms’’ for the president, Bozell said.
“Have you seen any stories in the press questioning the effect of a tax increase and how it will raise no revenue to take care of this problem?’’ he said.
“How many stories have we seen in the press where people are attacking Grover Norquist and the Norquist Pledge?’’
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Bozell believes the biggest inaccuracy the media is reporting the impending fiscal cliff is in its emphasis on “taxes, when taxes has nothing to do with it. It’s spending.’’
He added that “there is a rank dishonesty in Washington, D.C. which goes back to the Reagan years where Congress doesn’t own up to its own promises … So, at the end of the day, people who are talking about this deal – the media should be talking about how the Democrats break their word every single time.