Team McCain goes back to using ridicule as a finely honed weapon.  In this ad, though, rather than poke fun at Barack Obama’s celebrity, they instead take the gift that Joe Biden gave them on taxes and unwrap it deliciously, noting that an Obama-Biden administration would result in “lots more patriots”:

Joe Biden calls paying higher taxes a “patriotic” act. Obama and Biden voted to raise taxes on working Americans making just $42,000 a year.

Higher taxes on seniors and their life savings. Higher taxes on your electric bills.

Lots more taxes. Lots more patriots.

Biden certainly put his foot in his mouth. Just when the media had started to push back a little on the picture that John McCain had painted about Barack Obama being a big-time taxer, Biden tells the media that paying higher taxes is a patriotic duty. And when given the chance to retreat a little, Biden instead makes it sound like a religious duty as well.

The media pushback has always been disingenuous anyway. They point to Obama’s tax plan on income tax only, without mentioning the hikes on capital-gains rates and corporate taxes that Obama plans. They never mention that 70% of the country is in the investor class now and will run afoul of the new capital-gains tax rates, or that higher corporate taxes mean higher prices — and more companies relocating outside the US.  Does Obama think that businesses just eat costs?  Either prices go up or jobs get cut, the same as they do when Congress arbitrarily raises labor costs by increasing the minimum wage.

Higher taxes are only patriotic if you think the IRS is the most American of all institutions.  I asked Team McCain to make this ad in my original post yesterday, so Biden’s tax comment is a religious lesson after all: Ask and ye shall receive.