“A Game Of Chicken”: Republicans Want To Burn The Coop
Well, here we go again. Another season, another manufactured, self-inflicted, completely preventable crisis of government. This time it’s the sequester.
We may as well put these things in the Farmers’ Almanac.
Now we’re engaged in a finger-wagging blame game of who proposed it, who supported it and who is opposed to preventing it.
Let’s lay out some of the facts of this disaster.
The sequester’s origin is quite muddy.
President Obama, responding to Mitt Romney in an October presidential debate, said: “First of all, the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”
John Boehner, on the other hand, now says that the sequester is Obama’s baby. In a speech on the House floor this month, Boehner said:
“The president first proposed this ‘sequester’ in 2011 and insisted it be part of the debt-limit agreement.”
In an opinion piece published Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, Boehner wrote, “Having first proposed and demanded the sequester, it would make sense that the president lead the effort to replace it.”
PolitiFact rated Obama’s claim that the sequester was proposed by Congress as “mostly false” saying:
“It was Obama’s negotiating team that came up with the idea for defense cuts in 2011, though they were intended to prod Congress to come up with a better deal for reining in the deficit, not as an effort to make those cuts reality. Meanwhile, members of both parties in Congress voted for the legislation that set up the possibility of sequestration. Obama’s position is that Congress should now act to avoid those across-the-board cuts. Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his, but he did need cooperation from Congress to get to this point.”
PolitiFact bases its assessment largely on assertions in the new book “The Price of Politics,” by the renowned Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The Web site does, however, point out that there are dissenting views, including that of Christopher Preble at the libertarian Cato Institute. PolitiFact quotes Preble as saying, “I do not believe it accurate to refer to the cuts that will occur in both defense and nondefense discretionary spending under sequestration as ‘Obama’s cuts.’ ”
And John Avlon, a senior columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote Wednesday that he “happened to come across an old e-mail that throws cold water on House Republicans’ attempts to call this ‘Obama’s Sequester.”
According to Avlon:
“It’s a PowerPoint presentation that Boehner’s office developed with the Republican Policy Committee and sent out to the Capitol Hill GOP on July 31, 2011. Intended to explain the outline of the proposed debt deal, the presentation is titled, ‘Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.’ It’s essentially an internal sales document from the old dealmaker Boehner to his unruly and often unreasonable Tea Party cohort. But it’s clear as day in the presentation that ‘sequestration’ was considered a cudgel to guarantee a reduction in federal spending — the conservatives’ necessary condition for not having America default on its obligations.
The presentation lays out the deal in clear terms, describing the spending backstop as “automatic across-the-board cuts (‘sequestration’). Same mechanism used in 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.”
So, there’s that.
But I’m not sure where all this you- are-the-father origination blame game gets us.
The bill got bipartisan support in the House and at the time Boehner bragged:
“When you look at this final agreement that we came to with the White House, I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”
And President Obama signed it.
None of this changes the fact that the sequester is still bearing down on us, and it still holds horrible consequences that we didn’t think we’d be facing.
Now we are stuck in a vicious fight about what, if anything, can be done to prevent it and protect an economy that is just beginning to emerge from the muck.
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “Our estimate of approximately one million lost jobs due to sequester remains our base case if a full sequester occurs as scheduled on March 1.”
So once again the American people are caught in the middle of a game of chicken between Democrats, who rightly warn that the sky could fall, and Republicans, who want to burn the coop.
Thus far, the president and the Democrats are outmaneuvering the Republicans in the messaging war, but that will be of cold comfort if the Republican hotheads prevail.
Erskine Bowles, the former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, and the Bowles half of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, said of impending cuts: “They are dumb and they are stupid, stupid, stupid. They are inane.”
And yet dumb, stupid and inane have become the three pillars of government now that strong-willed, dimwitted hard-liners who see compromise as a dirty word have infiltrated the halls of Congress.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 20, 2013
“The Party Of John C. Calhoun”: The Fall Of The GOP True Believers
Political parties rarely vanish altogether, and hardly ever over a single election cycle. So the demise of the Republicans as a national organization is probably exaggerated. At minimum, its strength across the old Confederacy and what Mencken called the “Cow States” should enable the GOP to keep Congress semi-paralyzed and the shrinking Fox News audience in a state of incipient hysteria even as it fights internal battles of surpassing nastiness.
In that sense, the fight over Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense and Sen. John McCain’s erratic quest to turn the Benghazi tragedy into a huge scandal are symptomatic: all word-games, question-begging and make-believe indignation aimed not at governance, but TV appearances.
For all the theatrics, Republican senators apparently won’t filibuster their former colleague’s nomination indefinitely. I expect most are privately appalled at seeing Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas, question Hagel’s loyalty—something I doubt he’d have the temerity to say anywhere except in front of a TV camera.
On Meet the Press, David Gregory asked McCain to stipulate what he thinks the Obama administration’s hiding about the Benghazi incident.
“A cover-up of what?”
“Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans,” McCain sputtered.
What else could he say? The idea that the White House refused to call the assault on the U.S. Consulate a terror attack has been a media put-up job driven by the dark arts of selective quotation and malicious paraphrase. People who really care have long since figured that out; those who haven’t probably can’t.
Beyond mischief-making, however, there are signs that conservative thinkers are beginning to challenge moribund Republican orthodoxy. The water is moving under the ice. Heterodox opinions once limited to former GOP operatives like David Frum and Bruce Bartlett have started appearing all over.
Consider this shocking passage about tax rates by National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru in the New York Times:
When Reagan cut rates for everyone, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the income tax was the biggest tax most people paid. Now neither of those things is true: For most of the last decade the top rate has been 35 percent, and the payroll tax is larger than the income tax for most people. Yet Republicans have treated the income tax as the same impediment to economic growth and middle-class millstone that it was in Reagan’s day.
Ponnuru adds that GOP “tight-money” fundamentalism and scare talk about runaway inflation make absolutely no sense after five years of near-non-existent inflation. When it comes to fiscal matters, in short, Republicans are confronting today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions, substituting dogma for problem solving, and excommunicating heretics instead of encouraging independent thought. If Ponnuru can’t quite bring himself to agree with President Obama about the need for economic stimulus, at least he doesn’t sound like a parrot.
Far less polite is former GOP congressional staffer Michael S. Lofgren, who delivers himself of a veritable jeremiad in the Huffington Post. “As with many religions,” Lofgren writes, “political parties have a tendency to start as a movement, transform into a business, and finally degenerate into a racket designed to fleece the yokels. One organization which has gone out of its way to illustrate this evolution is the Republican Party.”
If that doesn’t clear your sinuses, Lofgren’s title might do it: “Scientology for Rednecks: What the GOP Has Become.” Now, as a matter of principle, I dislike the term “redneck,” an offensive ethnic insult like any other. A writer is on shaky ground objecting to racially coded attacks upon President Obama while using a term like it to characterize Republican voters.
Lofgren’s larger point, however, is well-taken. “Compared to the current crop of congressional GOP freshmen and sophomores, even George W. Bush looks like Henry Cabot Lodge.” Republicans have allowed themselves to become the anti-science party, indebted to tycoon-funded “think tanks” and in thrall to paranoid talk-radio ravers who encourage its dwindling voter base to see themselves as a “martyr-like… persecuted remnant of Real Americans.”
In consequence, GOP True Believers have rendered themselves incapable of noticing “the complete failure during the last 30 years of tax cuts for the wealthy to increase revenue, kick-start economic growth, or help the middle class.” They’re getting screwed, and blaming the wrong people.
Writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus launches an even more fundamental critique. “Conservatism Is Dead,” he writes, replaced by “inverse Marxists” preaching backward-looking utopianism that promises a return to an America that never existed.
In a companion piece entitled “Original Sin,” he laments that “the party of Lincoln—of the Gettysburg Address, with its reiteration of the Declaration’s assertion of equality and its vision of a ‘new birth of freedom’—has found sustenance in Lincoln’s principal intellectual and moral antagonist. It has become the party of [John C.]Calhoun.”
That is to say, of “nullification” and the Confederate States of America.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 20, 2013
“An Angry Old Man”: John McCain Plants His Flag In The Fever Swamps
It wasn’t that new or surprising, but Sen. John McCain’s insistence on Meet the Press yesterday that the Obama administration was engaged in a “massive coverup” of Benghazi! is an indication that conspiracy-shouting on the subject among Republicans won’t go away any time soon, or perhaps ever.
Now maybe I’m wrong, but it seems any line of inquiry about a past event that consists solely of questions rather than any specific allegations or even suspicions is designed to be eternal. All the semi-legitimate concerns about what happened and why should have been resolved by the State Department’s December report. Does it explain every utterance about the event by administration figures? No, because they really just don’t matter except in terms of some master narrative of Obama knowing the War on Terror is a more urgent priority than ever and deliberately hiding the evidence because he’s soft on Muslims or hates Israel or something.
Perhaps this is just McCain being an angry old guy who can’t let go of anything; he is, after all, about to vote against Chuck Hagel’s confirmation for Secretary of Defense because Hagel won’t admit he was wrong about McCain’s precious Iraq “surge.” But it also illustrates how fiercely today’s Republicans will hold onto any topic that leads into the soggy turf of vague but infamous fears about the 44th president.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 18, 2013
“Staying Stupid”: Why The ‘Hip’ Young Republicans Can’t Change Their Party Or Themselves
Savvy Republicans know that something is deeply wrong with the GOP – frequently mocked these days by Republicans themselves as “the stupid party” — which has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Some have noticed as well that their congressional majority is so widely despised – its main achievement being historically low public approval ratings — as to be sustainable only by gerrymandering. During the last election cycle, those fearsome Republican SuperPACs, funded by the overlords of Wall Street and Las Vegas, spent hundreds of millions of dollars – with no discernible impact on an alienated electorate.
The result is a burgeoning self-improvement movement on the right, generating introspective articles and interviews in which Republicans ask: “What is wrong with us? How can we change? What must we do to avoid partisan extinction?”
But like many troubled people grappling with serious life issues, they aren’t truly ready for change. They want to maintain the status quo while giving lip service to reform – and changing as little as possible beyond the superficial. They would do anything to project a fresher image, more attractive and effective, without confronting their deeper problems.
The deceptions involved in this process are perfectly exposed in Robert Draper’s fascinating excursion among the urbane young Republicans whose frustration he skillfully reported in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. His account is well worth reading, if only to observe these self-consciously “hip” conservatives confronting the reality of last November – and failing utterly to comprehend its meaning. Early in Draper’s article, a GOP technology consultant notes that the youth vote for President Obama grew by 1.25 million in 2012 over 2008 (precisely the opposite of what most pundits and pollsters predicted). But he doesn’t seem to realize that the youth gap cannot be remedied by stronger social media or updated voter files.
The young Republicans bitterly mock the Romney campaign’s technological ineptitude, and complain more broadly about the party’s repellent reputation among young voters, minorities, gays, immigrants, women, and everyone sympathetic to them. They largely seem to believe that if the Republican National Committee would hire people like them – and if Rush Limbaugh and Todd Akin would simply shut the eff up – then the party could expand beyond its narrow, aging, white, and religiously conservative base.
As they hasten to assure Draper, these dissidents would adopt a friendlier attitude toward those who are different, and are even eager to engineer a few minor platform alterations to accommodate immigrants or gays.
But why would they make such concessions to decency? Not out of any sense of justice or shame. They are not interested in social justice and they only feel ashamed of losing. Rather than honestly confronting the harm done by pandering to bigotry and division, they’d prefer to paper it over with a smiley face and move on.
By proclaiming that their defeats are due mainly to technological inferiority or bad messaging, the young Republicans ignore the underlying source of popular disdain for their party. It is true that their technology was feeble, their candidate and consultants were incompetent, and their messaging was often repellent. But the self-styled hipsters of the right are in fact not much different from the Tea Party octogenarians in their hostility to government investment, social insurance, health care, education, and industry – and both are in conflict with the evolving attitudes of young Americans across all demographic lines.
The disgruntled figures who spoke with Draper represent almost nobody in the GOP, compared with the legions commanded by Limbaugh and the religious right. But if their fantasy could be made real, what shape would it take: A tech-savvy, gay-friendly, 21st-century Calvin Coolidge? A composite of Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul?
Good luck with that.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 19, 2013
“Demented Hummingbirds”: Marco Rubio And The GOP’s Thirst For Leadership
Secret Valentine’s Day memo to Sen. Marco Rubio from the Strategy Office of the Republican National Committee:
Dear Marco,
One simple word sums up your unorthodox rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union Address: Genius.
Pausing in the midst of a speech that nobody would otherwise remember, lunging off-camera for a bottle of water and then slurping it like a demented hummingbird? …
Time magazine was right. You are the savior of the Republican Party.
Was the whole country laughing at you? Possibly. OK, yeah.
But was it the most unpresidential thing you could have done? No! You could have walked out with your fly unzipped (whoa, don’t get any ideas!).
Truth be told, all of us here at the RNC started freaking out when we saw you stop and take that sip.
What’s that goofball doing? we wondered. Does he think it’s a rehearsal? Doesn’t he know he’s on live TV in front of, like, 50 million voters?
But once we stopped throwing our coffee cups and kicking our garbage cans, we calmed down and thought about what you’d done.
And we finally got it, Marco — the sheer brilliance.
The water grab wasn’t really a spontaneous and awkward moment, was it? You’d planned the whole darn thing, right down to your deer-in-the-headlights stare at the camera.
Of course you did, because that’s what saviors do. They see the big picture.
The script we gave you to read the other night was incredibly lame. In fact, it was basically Mitt Romney’s stump speech for the last three years. Didn’t work for him and, let’s face it, it wasn’t going to work for you, either.
Truth is, we don’t have any new ideas in the Republican Party. Our plan was to retread all our stale old ideas through a sharp, young Hispanic dude — you! — and hope people would think they’re hearing something fresh.
Obviously, you read through the script ahead of time and realized it was a turkey. So you improvised a visual distraction, something so ditzy that all of America would instantly stop paying attention to what you were saying.
In retrospect, it was the best thing that could have happened to our party. Thanks to you, Marco, nobody’s talking about that moldy little speech. They’re talking about you jonesing for that water bottle.
The video clip has gone totally viral. On YouTube you’re getting more hits than that adorable piano-playing hamster!
Here at RNC headquarters we’re receiving thousands of emails and tweets, including some from GOP donors who haven’t yet grasped the subtle cleverness of your “message.” Which is:
Yes, Sen. Rubio is really thirsty. The whole country is really thirsty!
Thirsty for a new direction, a new vision for the future.
We’re still ironing out some wrinkles, but you get the idea. You’ve struck gold, Marco, and we’re on it.
By: Carl Hiaasan, The National Memo, February 19, 2013
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