“Notorious Republican Prevaricators”: The Wrong Message, The Wrong Messengers
Over the last five or six years, Republicans have gone after President Obama with quite a bit of ferocity, launching attacks that most Americans have no doubt heard many times. Indeed, we can recite them from memory: Obama’s a radical socialist, power-mad tyrant who hates American traditions, wants to grab your guns, and is too dumb to speak without a teleprompter.
Putting aside whether that critique is in any way sane, Republicans generally haven’t had too much to say about President Obama’s trustworthiness. That changed rather dramatically in recent weeks, as we learned that instead of 100% of Americans gaining health care coverage or keeping the health insurance they like, about 95% of Americans will gain health care coverage or keep the health insurance they like.
And this has led some poor messengers to deliver an odd message. Here, for example, is Dick Cheney:
In an interview with Larry King, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that President Obama’s famous “If you like your plan, you can keep it” remark was a lie that the president repeated “over and over and over again.”
And here’s Mitt Romney:
Republican Mitt Romney is accusing President Barack Obama of being “dishonest” about his health care law…. In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” Friday, Romney said several times that Obama had been “dishonest.”
And here’s Paul Ryan:
“The next time you have a famous politician coming through Iowa, breezing through the towns, talking about big government, let’s be a little more skeptical,” Ryan said after berating President Barack Obama and Democrats for the troubled rollout of the health-care law.
Look, reasonable people can disagree about the severity of the “if you like your plan…” claim. It strikes me as an oversimplification of a complex policy, a position folks realized at the time was more of a shorthand than a 100% guarantee for literally every consumer in the nation, but if Obama’s critics want to consider it the Most Important Lie Ever Told, that’s up to them.
But listening to Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan talk about honesty, credibility, and the need for skepticism is just a bit too much. Romney broke new ground as one of the most brazenly mendacious politicians of his generation; Ryan’s fondness for falsehoods is extraordinary even in a Congress where dishonesty is the norm; and Dick Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney.
Americans shouldn’t turn to Lance Armstrong for wisdom on performance-enhancing drugs in sports; we shouldn’t turn to Miley Cyrus for guidance on public modesty; and we shouldn’t turn to Cheney, Romney, and Ryan for lectures on honesty in politics. It’s not complicated: they have no credibility because they have a nasty habit for saying things that aren’t true.
It’s a subjective question and your mileage may vary, but on balance, I’d say President Obama’s track record on telling the truth has been very strong. Fair-minded observers can debate the efficacy of his agenda and the merit of his ideas, but it’s difficult for even the fiercest Obama detractor to say the president has established a track record of saying one thing and doing another, making promises he has no intention of keeping, or flat out lying.
He’s made predictions that haven’t panned out, and he’s changed direction based on circumstances, but thinking about some of the notable presidential whoppers, Obama hasn’t exactly offered his critics anything comparable to “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” or perhaps most alarmingly, “We did not – repeat, did not – trade weapons or anything else for hostages.”
So maybe notorious Republican prevaricators can pick something else to focus on?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 18, 2013
“Thank You For Your Service, Or Not”: Republicans Thank Veterans By Cutting Food Stamps
The next time I hear a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives thank a veteran for his or her service, I’ll hurl.
Veterans Day is on Monday. This year the holiday will come 10 days after cuts in federal food aid demanded by House Republicans go into effect. The cuts mean that 47 million hungry Americans, including almost 1 million veterans, will be even hungrier and more malnourished than they were last Veterans Day.
Mother’s Day won’t be much better because 80 percent, or 37 million, of the food aid recipients are women and children. And for the record, 10 percent or almost 5 million of the recipients are senior citizens.
I hope the House Republican budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is proud of his handiwork because it’s a callous way of thanking vets for their service. Before the cuts, the average veteran received a little more than $4 a day for food from the feds. Now vets will have to get by on even less. Don’t try this at home, because if you try to eat on $4 a day, you will be malnourished pretty quickly. The GOP went to the mat to get these cuts and now they want even more.
The Republican hostility towards vets is just the latest episode in the sad saga of vets under the GOP. George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney both avoided serving in Vietnam when they were of draft age in the 1960’s. But that didn’t stop the deadly duo from sending more than 4,000 brave young Americans to their deaths in Iraq based on a lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction there.
If wounded soldiers were lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive, things didn’t get much better back home. During the Bush/Cheney administration, hospitals administered by the Veterans Administration were poorly staffed and inadequately equipped. The corridors of the “crown jewel” of the military hospital system, Walter Reed Hospital, were plagued with garbage and rats.
The tea party caucus in Congress forced $5 million a year in cuts for food aid. Why? Because the GOP shot down President Obama’s proposal to eliminate $6 billion in federal tax freebies to oil companies and firms that own corporate jets. While millionaires, billionaires and oil company executives fly the friendly federal skies, almost 1 million veterans are still in the desert, fighting hard. This time they struggle in a fight for food in the land of plenty.
Thank you for your service!
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 8, 2013
“Breathtakingly Cynical”: Guess Who Really Wants to Take Away Your Insurance? Republicans!
Republicans are outraged that some Americans must give up their current insurance plans because they don’t satisfy Obamacare’s new regulations for benefits and pricing. Partly they are mad at President Obama, because he repeatedly said people who like their coverage would get to keep it. And that’s fine. As I said yesterday, Obama should have said “most” people, not “all” people. Readers can decide for themselves whether, by the standards of politics, that’s a felony or misdemeanor.
But Republicans are also making a substantive argument here. It’s unconscionable, they say, that lawmakers would force people to give up their current coverage. Just a few minutes ago, during congressional testimony by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, an angry Representative Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee practically screamed at the witness: “You’re taking away their choice!”
It’s good politics, I’m sure. It’s also breathtakingly cynical. Republicans have repeatedly endorsed proposals that would take insurance away from many more Americans—and leave them much, much worse off.
Start with the federal budgets crafted by Paul Ryan. You remember those, right? Those proposals passed through the House with unanimous Republican support and were, in 2012, a basis of the Republican presidential platform. Those budgets called for dramatic funding cuts to Medicaid. If Republicans had swept into power and enacted such changes, according to projections prepared by Urban Institute scholars and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 14 and 20 million Medicaid recipients would lose their insurance. And that doesn’t even include the people who are starting to get Medicaid coverage through Obamacare’s expansions of the program. That’s another 10 to 17 million people.
And it’s not just people on Medicaid who would lose coverage if Republicans got their way. While Republicans in Congress have not unified by a single alternative to Obamacare, a building block of virtually every proposal in circulation is to equalize the tax treatment of employer-sponsored insurance and individual insurance—which, in layman’s terms, means making it much more appealing for somebody who gets coverage on the job to buy coverage on his or her own. Typically these proposals would allow insurers selling individual coverage to continue some of their current practices, like charging higher premiums or refusing to cover certain services for people with pre-existing conditions, or offering coverage with serous gaps in benefits. Most experts believe such reforms would hike the cost of employer plans, as only sicker people remained on them, potentially creating a “death spiral” that would lead to fewer employers offering plans. (Even the more optimistic estimates assume erosion of employer-sponsored insurance.)
Note the difference in scale here. Nobody knows exactly how many people are giving up non-group policies because insurers are reacting to Obamacare regulations. But it’s probably in the millions—and still substantially less than the number of people who would lose insurance if Ryan’s proposal for Medicaid became law.
More important, though, look at the kind of change taking place. Almost everybody giving up a non-group policy today has the option to get new insurance either through Medicaid or one of the new Obamacare marketplaces. Some people will pay more for these policies, some will pay less, but everybody will be getting coverage that includes an array of “essential” benefits, limits out-of-pocket spending, and can never be taken away or limited because the policyholder gets sick. In other words, everybody ends up with comprehensive, stable insurance. It may not be the policy he or she has today. But the vast majority of people with non-group market don’t keep the same policy for more than two years anyway.
Under the Republican plan, by contrast, people losing employer insurance would end up in the dysfunctional, non-reformed individual market—the one full of confusing, junk policies that might not cover basic services like maternity or mental health or have huge gaps in coverage. And the people losing Medicaid? They would end up with … nothing at all.
The real issue here isn’t simply Republican opportunism and hypocrisy—although, please, let’s not ignore that either. The real issue is about the true trade-offs of policy. Both sides offer them. With Obamacare, a small number of people lose their current insurance but they end up with alternative, typically stronger coverage. Under the plans Republicans have endorsed, a larger number of people would lose their current insurance, as people migrated to a more volatile and less secure marketplace. Under Obamacare, the number of Americans without health insurance at all will come down, eventually by 30 or 40 million. Under most of the Republican plans, the number of Americans without insurance would rise.
Honest Republicans would justify their policies by arguing that Medicaid is a wasteful, inefficient program not worth keeping—and their changes, overall, would reduce health care spending while maximizing liberty. In other words, forcing people to give up their coverage is worth it. I don’t agree with those arguments, but they are honest. But they should stop pretending that it’s possible to address the problems of American health care without disrupting at least some people’s insurance arrangements—because, after all, they want to do the very same thing.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, October 30, 2013
“Feeding The Gullible Beltway Media”: The Delusional And Dangerous Paul Ryan Holds Himself Up As A Broker
It’s a measure of how gullible the Beltway media are that when Rep. Paul Ryan held himself up as the guy to broker a GOP deal on the debt ceiling and government shutdown with President Obama last week, he was greeted as a potential savior. Nobody seemed to notice that he was trying to push much of his discredited Ryan budget on Democrats in exchange for Republicans simply doing their job: opening up government and avoiding a debt default.
As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has belatedly begun reminding people, those are not concessions. Republicans say they want both things, and they should: their poll numbers are in the toilet and constituents are furious because of the government shutdown, and a debt ceiling would crater the economy.
But Ryan pushed anyway, as though he had a chance to force his terms on Obama and recalcitrant Democrats. That’s almost as delusional as former Vice President Dick Cheney saying we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq. But let’s give Cheney credit for one thing: He was elected vice president, twice. Ryan failed at that task a year ago and cannot be considered a serious candidate for national office.
The National Review’s Robert Costa, who is doing some of the best reporting on the House GOP, took issue with my calling Ryan “delusional” on MSNBC’s “Up with Steve Kornacki” Sunday morning. “I don’t think the word is delusional, because there was a moment last week when Ryan published that Wall Street Journal op-ed, the House was really leading the talks, and Ryan was engaging directly with the president. For a brief moment it seemed like Ryan could be the one to get his right flank to come along….Once Harry Reid really stepped into the fray, Paul Ryan’s whole influence over the process kind of evaporated.”
OK, but isn’t it a little bit delusional to believe Reid would stay out of the fray? Now comes news that Ryan has done a 180 and declared that House Republicans must fight whatever the Senate comes up with, even a compromise floated by GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine that Reid has already rejected for giving up too much. While the Collins proposal would open the government for six months and lift the debt ceiling enough to get to January, it delays the medical device tax two years and sets other conditions on the Affordable Care Act. Reid insists the Senate won’t negotiate about the ACA or anything else under debt-ceiling/shutdown duress.
Ryan, who was savaged by some on the right last week for seeming to trade the goal of repealing Obamacare in exchange for Obama embracing most of the infamous Ryan budget, is now back to Obamacare. In fact, he’s insisting the House GOP shouldn’t back any deal that opens the government or extends the debt ceiling deadline without major changes to the Affordable Care Act, including letting employers withhold birth-control coverage from insurance plans for religious reasons.
Get it? They’re back to their crusade against birth control access. If that doesn’t define delusional, I’m not sure what does.
To be fair to Ryan, he dropped his politically toxic plan to voucherize Medicare in his latest proposal and mostly stuck to Medicare trimming that Obama himself had endorsed in the last round of grand bargain negotiating in 2011. While I think the president was willing to go too far to cut a deal – and may have been saved from himself by Republican insanity – it must be noted he was offering those cuts in exchange for major revenue increases. He was not offering them in exchange for the House and Senate GOP coming to its senses and doing its job, instead of holding the country hostage to pass legislative changes they can’t win enough political power to enact through legislation.
So yes, Ryan was always delusional – but now he’s even more so. The individual mandate will not be delayed, and the contraceptive provisions of the ACA will not be made optional. What’s dangerous is that Beltway reporters are so hungry for signs of GOP sanity that they hold up Ryan as reasonable, which feeds his own delusion that he’s politically crucial.
Now Ryan is really, really angry at Senate Republicans, according to NRO’s Jonathan Strong, and he’s going to take his ball and go home. “They’re trying to cut the House out, and trying to jam us with the Senate. We’re not going to roll over and take that,” Ryan told reporters on Saturday.
The only way this ends is the only way it ever was going to end: with House Speaker John Boehner, having let extremist GOP babies cry themselves out, finally passing a deal with the support of Democrats. And he shouldn’t count on them being the Democrats who approved the debt-ceiling “deal” that ultimately imposed sequester cuts, or the fiscal-cliff deal that compromised on tax rates and kicked those cuts down the road. On both the Senate and House side – where Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi openly frets that Democrats have “been enablers” of the “irresponsible” GOP – there’s a new tone of toughness. Let’s hope it holds.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon.com, October 13, 2013
“The Dixiecrat Solution”: The Only Way Out Of This Republican Mess
So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.
Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.
And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.
Stocks surged last Friday in the belief that House Republicans were getting ready to back down on their ransom demands over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. But what Republicans were actually offering, it seems, was the “compromise” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article: rolling back some of the “sequester” budget cuts — which both parties dislike; cuts in Medicare, but with no quid pro quo in the form of higher revenue; and only a temporary fix on the debt ceiling, so that we would soon find ourselves in crisis again.
I do not think that word “compromise” means what Mr. Ryan thinks it means. Above all, he failed to offer the one thing the White House won’t, can’t bend on: an end to extortion over the debt ceiling. Yet even this ludicrously unbalanced offer was too much for conservative activists, who lambasted Mr. Ryan for basically leaving health reform intact.
Does this mean that we’re going to hit the debt ceiling? Quite possibly; nobody really knows, but careful observers are giving no better than even odds that any kind of deal will be reached before the money runs out. Beyond that, however, our current state of dysfunction looks like a chronic condition, not a one-time event. Even if the debt ceiling is raised enough to avoid immediate default, even if the government shutdown is somehow brought to an end, it will only be a temporary reprieve. Conservative activists are simply not willing to give up on the idea of ruling through extortion, and the Obama administration has decided, wisely, that it will not give in to extortion.
So how does this end? How does America become governable again?
One answer might be that we somehow stumble through the next 13 months, and voters punish Republican tactics by returning the House to Democratic control. Recent polls do show a large Democratic advantage on the generic House ballot. But remember, Democratic House candidates already “won” in 2012, in the sense that they received more votes in total than Republicans. Yet the vagaries of district boundaries — partly, but not entirely, the result of gerrymandering — meant that the Republican majority in seats remained, and it would probably take a really huge Democratic sweep to dislodge G.O.P. control.
There is, however, another solution, and everyone knows what it is. Call it Dixiecrats in reverse.
Here’s the precedent: For a long time, starting as early as 1938, Democrats generally controlled Congress on paper, but actual control often rested with an alliance between Republicans and conservative Southerners who were Democrats in name only. You may not like what this alliance did — among other things, it killed universal health insurance, which we might otherwise have had 65 years ago. But at least America had a functioning government, untroubled by the kind of craziness that now afflicts us.
And right now we have all the necessary ingredients for a comparable alliance, with roles reversed. Despite denials from Republican leaders, everyone I talk to believes that it would be easy to pass both a continuing resolution, reopening the government, and an increase in the debt ceiling, averting default, if only such measures were brought to the House floor. How? The answer is, they would get support from just about all Democrats plus some Republicans, mainly relatively moderate non-Southerners. As I said, Dixiecrats in reverse.
The problem is that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, won’t allow such votes, because he’s afraid of the backlash from his party’s radicals. Which points to a broader conclusion: The biggest problem we as a nation face right now is not the extremism of Republican radicals, which is a given, but the cowardice of Republican non-extremists (it would be stretching to call them moderates).
The question for the next few days is whether plunging markets and urgent appeals from big business will stiffen the non-extremists’ spines. For as far as I can tell, the reverse-Dixiecrat solution is the only way out of this mess.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 14, 2013
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