Assumptions Assumptions Assumptions at Frankly CuriousFrankly Curious

Jonathan Chait is at it again, getting laughs while demolishing right wing idiocy. Today, it is fucktard (accent on the tard) Jennifer Rubin and her willful (?) misunderstanding of the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of Mitt Romney’s tax plan. This is the analysis that showed that even if you accepted all of Romney’s unbelievable assumptions, you still couldn’t get it to work without it being—What a surprise!—a huge tax cut for the rich and a tax hike for the poor and middle class.

On Sunday morning, Jennifer Rubin of Fox on 15th decided to take on those nasty liberals—who were wonderful nonpartisan analysts only a couple of months ago—at the Tax Policy Center. Ha! She was going to show that they were making assumptions about Romney’s tax plan, and those assumptions were unfair!

Unfortunately, it seems just like CNN and Fox News after the Supreme Court’s ACA decision was handed down, Rubin didn’t read past the first page—or even understand the words she did read. As Chait notes, “The math is so incontestable here that the only rebuttal left is Rubin’s I-don’t-understand-what-words-mean interpretive method.” She claimed that the Tax Policy Center was making assumptions when they in fact are saying, “We grant all of Romney’s assumptions—even if we think them unrealistic—and his tax plan still doesn’t work as advertised.”

Chait explains it thusly:

Rubin seems unfamiliar with this form of argumentation. Let me demonstrate the principle. Suppose Rubin were to write, “The liberal media refuse to report that the rightful winner of the Olympic Games is actually Mitt Romney, who defeated the entire U.S. women’s soccer team by himself.” And then I were to reply that, even if Romney had accomplished this goal, which I doubt, he would be ineligible for the gold medal because he is not a woman. It would not rebut my argument for Rubin to insist that Romney had too defeated the U.S. women’s soccer team all by himself. She would have to address the point I am actually contesting — namely, Romney’s gender eligibility to claim the women’s soccer gold medal.

Yet the Republican talking points just echo on.