By Ed Kilgore
Political Animal - Return of the Squirrel Sex Study Meme
Just when you thought this week in politics could not get any dumber, Speaker John Boehner, in his flailing efforts to make his partyÂ’s fiscal position going into the sequester seem more reasonable, is resorting to the oldest idiocy of them all: the claim that government spending is mostly a bunch of crazy boondoggles. Here we go:
[N]o one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines.
Jonathan Chait went to the trouble of tracking down what Boehner was talking about, and of course, itÂ’s mostly a shuck, like the ancient claims that everybodyÂ’s taxes were high because pointy-headed federal bureaucrats were paying egghead scientists to study the mating habits of squirrels. The amount of money involved in these anecdotal examples is, of course, next to nothing. And they are blatantly intended to distract attention from the bigger picture, as Chait notes:
Why have Republicans settled on this utterly inane talking point? A close look at the latest Pew poll shows itÂ’s the only card they have to play in the fiscal showdown. The public opinion landscape is utterly bleak for Boehner. Congress is way less popular than Obama. The Republican Party is way less popular than the Democratic Party. People trust Obama more than Republicans to handle budget issues. They want a mix of revenue and spending cuts. (Even a majority of Republicans reject the cuts-only approach insisted on by GOP leaders.)
The lone bright spot on this desolate landscape is that Americans want spending cuts to account for a larger share of the deficit reduction. Now the question is framed in the most Republican-friendly way. The poll doesnÂ’t ask about raising taxes just on the rich, which is much more popular than generalized tax hikes. It also doesnÂ’t name specific programs like Medicare and Social Security, which Americans resolutely oppose cutting under any circumstances.
What Boehner has going for him here is a generalized ignorance about the federal budget. Americans think thereÂ’s lots of waste and donÂ’t grasp that balancing the budget through spending cuts would require cutting programs they donÂ’t want to cut. BoehnerÂ’s best play is to keep the debate on the level of abstraction, focused on mythical wasteÂ….
So why are Republicans resorting to this very cheapest kind of demagoguery? It seems to be all theyÂ’ve got at this point:
Boehner doesnÂ’t have an actual plan to balance the budget by making surly video-game players pay for their own damn World of Warcraft. He wants to force Obama to propose cuts to retirement programs without any revenue. He doesnÂ’t have any apparent strategy to achieve this goal. He just has a talking point to try to wave it away.
So thereÂ’s budget-talk that exceeds the sequester in stupidity all right, and weÂ’ll be hearing it a lot during the next week.
ttp://www.politicususa.com/faced-evidence-sequester-idea-boehner-blames-obama.html
boehner-white-flag
Despite the fact that a PowerPoint presentation from 2011 surfaced today with his name on it, John Boehner continues to blame Obama for the sequester.
The “question” of who the sequester belongs to should no longer be in doubt after The Daily Beast uncovered a July 2011 PowerPoint presentation that Speaker Boehner gave detailing the the use of the sequester as a Republican strategy. The Speaker didn’t just give the presentation. His name was on the PowerPoint slides.
boehner-slide
Boehner responded to the destruction of his talking point by demonstrating the skills that have made him one of the worst Speakers in history.
In a statement, Rep. Boehner said,
I agree with the Secretary of Defense that the impact of the president’s sequester would be devastating to our military. That’s why the House has acted twice to replace the president’s sequester with common-sense cuts and reforms that protect our national security, and it’s why I’ve been calling on the president for more than a year to press his Democratic-controlled Senate to do the same. Despite dire warnings from his own Secretary of Defense for more than a year that the sequester would ‘hollow out’ our military, the president has yet to put forward a specific plan that can pass his Democratic-controlled Senate, and has exerted no pressure on the Democratic leadership of the Senate to actually pass legislation to replace the sequester he proposed. As the commander-in-chief, President Obama is ultimately responsible for our military readiness, so it’s fair to ask: what is he doing to stop his sequester that would ‘hollow out’ our Armed Forces?
When faced with new evidence that the sequester was his idea, Speaker Boehner continued to blame President Obama. House Republicans think that if they keep repeating the same false statements over and over again, the American people will eventually believe them and blame the president.
Speaker Boehner has nothing now. His ObamaÂ’s sequester attacks have gone nowhere. Boehner has no way left to spin this, and his party will be getting the blame if these automatic cuts arenÂ’t avoided. From now on when Republicans try to blame Obama for the sequester, all Democrats have to do is hold up the slides with BoehnerÂ’s name on them, and the wrath of a nation will hit the Speaker and his Republican caucus like a house of bricks.
Despite the mainstream mediaÂ’s best efforts to blame both the president and congress, the blame for this mess is going to come down on Boehner and his party. Last month, the Speaker reassured the conservative movement that the sequester was his trump card. It turns out that his trump card was a joker, and it is only a matter of time until Boehner starts plotting his exit strategy that will result in his biggest cave yet to President Obama.
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eusa_eh
. (Forbes has been known to be less partisan on occasion however). Theres a reason that Bush II's tax-cuts had a sunset provision, because Bush's numbers wouldn't have added-up. Stop advocating the kick the can down the road philosophy. 
..... a Democrat.
