The only certainty is that we’re doomed to continue this dance for many days yet. As a Californian I can tell you that going into budget default means the dance continues for endless months more.

Other thoughts:

1. Obama has said that substantial reductions in the debt are economically necessary. They’re not, but that’s what he’s said. So if he fails to get a deal, then by his own definition, he’s failed to do what the economy needs.

2. He’s also claimed that we can’t even have a conversation about jobs and growth, until the debt issue is resolved, because, he claims, business uncertainty about the debt and future taxes are hindering hiring. This too is gibberish, but it’s what he’s said. So by his own words, he can’t address the jobless problem unless/until he gets the debt deal.

3. He’s now endorsed the Tea-GOP view that its perfectly reasonable to use a debt limit raising as the correct opportunity to push for lowering spending and reducing the debt. So he’s now legitimated that irresponsible tactic. Even if there’s a modest deal, he own words/rhetoric will call that a failure, because the correct answer should have been, he says, a much bigger payment on debt reduction as a condition for raising the debt limit.

4. He’s legistimized the view that Social Security and Medicare and Medicair are “debt crisis” problems and have to be solved. That too is gibberish. But it’s now the bipartisan view and accepted by the media. So we’ll have to face that rhetoric and efforts to slash these programs again and again, it defenders will have a hard time arguing against this.

5. He’s basically said, the Democrats in the House don’t matter, and he doesn’t even need to consult with or even inform the Senate about his negotiating positions, even though he expects both House and Senate Dems to accept whatever he agrees to. He’s emasculated his own party, even though it has a nominal majority in the Senate, and they have allowed him to do it.

6. And hes has probably pissed away any value to Dems ability to claim they’re the party to protect the New Deal/Great Society. He’s foreced them to remain silent when he argues protecting those foundations has to fall to the need for debt reduction, a completely stupid economic argument, never mind political stupid.

One more thing. Lawrence O’Donnell argues that when Obama “offered” all these concessins, he was lying, and he lied repeatedly to the public in his various press conferences, just to fool the Republicans. so what this means is, the Tea-GOP gets to run ads in 2012 saying the President never acted in good faith, he always meant to put the goal posts too far away, and he lied repeatedly to the American people. That’s what O’Donnell said, on at least four different nights.

Now there’s a strategy: Vote for me because I know how to lie to you and the GOP. And to you Independents, vote for me because I’m the reasonable guy, except when I’m negotiating in bad faith.

I thought the title was “The Ugly Truth about What Was Really Left After the Alter”.

You know,what’s left after you “alter” a male?

I think the matrimonial kind is spelled altar..come to think of it maybe they could be interchangeable. No doubt some males feel altered by the altar.

12
Was a fire extinguisher used on Boehner’s pants after he made that statement?

Excellent post, about the caterwauler-in-chief, EW.

Fine points, Scarecrow.

And I agree with Gitchee, perhaps it would cast a good spell to alter the title, “a” bit?

;~DW

Another genius graphic by twolf.

I don’t get the graphic – isn’t Boehner the one who keeps getting up and leaving?

19
You can’t see his running shoes and sweat pants (over his running shorts – eeew, the thought of spray-tanned legs!).

I often lament the fact that FDR apparently has been relegated to history’s ash bin by today’s media,in general;and, the Dems,in particular.(Of course, the concerted effort to dismantle Social Security-an FDR achievemnet-may have a little something to do with it.)

I just can’t imagine our present day leaders,saying that they welcome the hatred of Wall Street ,as FDR did in his 1936 Madison Square Garden speech.. here’s a small excerpt, but the entire piece is as salient now-or more so- than when spoken 75 years ago.

“For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge!… Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America’s working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.

Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.”

NOTE: This was delivered on October 31,1936. ..Halloween night. No treats were dispensed by FDR in this speech.

Can someone send the ENTIRE transcript to Murdoch and also the Chamber of Commerce’s Tom Donohue??

Mr. Obama must want us to imagine him as heading a “national” government, that is, the kind of non-party, multi-party, above the fray coalition government that was once possible during war time. That’s often a prelude to dispensing with other normal rules of partisan combat, such as political parties, and formal rules of government, such as constitutional limitations on authority and the powers and duties of competing branches of government.

Lloyd George and Churchill led British governments with similar tendencies during the First and Second World Wars. Party politics and competing views of reality and what government should do to respond to society’s needs quickly reasserted themselves after hostilities. Since the GWOT conveniently has no end, that process has been delayed here; in fact, it’s made less probable and possible.

That suggests that the new “normal” Mr. Bush – and many in Congress and the courts – are creating is a single branch, president-only form of government that is even less responsive to the needs of average Americans than a fault-ridden representative government we’ve had for 200 years.

In wartime, the economic and social needs of society are relegated to the bottom rung of the ladder of priorities, replaced by existential need for survival, security and retribution. What we’ve had since 9/11 is actual warfare, and its continuing and expanding. We now also have economic warfare, as a small elite orchestrates for itself more and more of the national economic pie, and arrogates to itself more intrusive surveillance and police powers in order to keep it and to punish those who might take it away from them by demanding different governmental policies and practices.

What we have in Mr. Obama is a political surfer. He doesn’t care what the wave is, he’ll ride it all the same. If the foregoing are the political and economic waves hitting the shore of the American public, he isn’t going to “oppose” them by demanding more progressive or even centrist policies. He would consider that like talking to a wave instead of riding it, a physical impossibility. He will simply ride those waves as he would any other. And as long as he’s riding them, he doesn’t care what they do to the shoreline after they hit.

Phil Perspective on July 22, 2011 at 10:08 pm said:

GulfCoastPirate:
I forget, are you who I think you are? ;-)

I’m not sure how to answer that question. Who do you think I am?