The deficit monster sleeps peacefully in its cave, fed by conservative overspending and record deficit financing. But whenever a democrat reigns the monster stirs to life, angry and hungry, and bellows its disgust at any spending that does not directly benefit the wealthy:
(CBS) — Republican leaders are laying down a new challenge to President Obama and Democrats over tax cuts and the national debt. That could mean another ugly confrontation is coming, just in time for the November election. The two parties are still fighting over the fallout from the last debt debate.
And now, House Speaker John Boehner (R, Ohio) is drawing a new line in the sand, making another showdown over the debt almost inevitable. Boehner issued the warning Tuesday, declaring, “We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. (As a) matter of fact, I think we should welcome it.”
Yes, the two parties are still fighting because, hey, both parties do it, right? And sure enough, in the last fight between both parties, one party came to the table willing to talk about extending the limit as both Bushes and Reagan did dozens of times, with some spending cuts and raising taxes on income over one-zillion dollars by a point or two until the wars and other Bush excesses are paid for. The other party wanted to crash the US bond market and lay waste to the entire world because they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood and cut off healthcare for millions of working women. So, yeah, both parties do it.
No doubt we’ll now be treated to a series of cable news lectures and public scoldings on the major networks by the same people who created the greatest deficits in history and their buddies, who managed to leverage that into the biggest default of all time requiring public bailouts to the tune of a trillion plus taxpayer bucks.
Re: “Both parties do it”, I thought in this context that referred more to the fact that every time the debt ceiling needs to be raised, the party not in power throws a phony tantrum about how it’s the most irresponsible thing ever, securing some token concessions for themselves as well as weakening public perception of the other guys. In that sense, the accusation is warranted: Any time the debt ceiling has needed to be raised while Republicans are in power, the Democrats make a stink out of it.
What made the last round different has nothing to do with Democrats being paragons of compromise and rationality.. it was that this time the tantrum wasn’t phony. Too many of the Tea Party candidates weren’t actually bluffing. The bluffing bullshit is disappointing business-as-usual, and yeah, both parties do it. Problem is, somebody forgot to give the Tea Partiers the instruction manual (either that or they were just too illiterate to read it…)
Hopefully Boehner has learned his lesson from last time and the message has been communicated through the ranks that this is a bluff. I remember that in the final days of the last crisis, he was making some public statements that made it clear he was kinda shitting his pants (as much of an asshole as Boehner is, he’s not one of the batshit crazy I’m-not-bluffing freaks. Boehner is for sure one of the bad guys, but at least he “got the memo”)
The worst case scenario here is that Boehner and the other GOP power brokers have gotten a big head from last time, and think they can use the not-actually-bluffing fools as pawns to their advantage. That would be… dangerous to say the least.