Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivers a devastating speech on the floor of the Senate calling out Obama for threatening to veto the Boehner plan should it make it to his desk. Well, actually, Obama isn’t even willing to make the threat himself and is instead hiding behind the skirts of some unnamed advisers. This is nothing but a completely transparent attempt on Obama’s part to shift any blame for a veto to someone other than himself should it actually come to that.
But McConnell correctly calls Obama out as being willing to veto the country into default, an action that he himself has described as having devastating consequences for not only the U.S. but the entire world, all for purely partisan political purposes. So Obama apparently cares more about his own chances for re-election than he does for the good of the country. Being a Liberal, I am not surprised.
The GOP proposal, which would have raised the statutory borrowing cap to $16.7 trillion, did not get a single Republican vote and garnered just 97 Democrats in favor. Three-hundred-eighteen lawmakers voted ‘no,’ including 82 Democrats and all 236 Republicans in the chamber. Seven Democrats voted present.
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House Democrats, at the urging of Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), voted against the legislation because he didn’t think it wise for Democrats to open themselves up to a “political 30 second ad,” he told reporters — a sign that Democrats are well aware of the peril with which they vote to pile onto the national debt without accompanying spending cuts.
House Republicans were looking for Democrats to fall right into that trap. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) had 114 Democrats on a letter calling for such a vote. Betting that the national mood will back budget cuts and fiscal responsibility, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) responded to Welch and President Barack Obama’s call for a clean debt limit vote by scheduling one on the floor.
So the Democrats have been running around whining about how we need to raise the debt ceiling in a clean vote to save the country and the economy without any strings attached and when the Republicans call their bluff by actually scheduling exactly that, well then suddenly that’s a trap. A panic stricken Steny Hoyer has to run around encouraging Democrats to vote against the very thing they wanted.
Totally and utterly busted, the Democrats are. (A little Yoda speak for ya).
This just exposes how the Democrats are only interested in playing politics and not doing the right thing for the country. If a clean vote on raising the debt ceiling, there very thing they had been lobbying so hard for all this time, was in fact the best thing for the country they would have backed it by voting for it. Caving like this exposes how vacuous their previous pleas actually were, and still are.
They couldn’t even muster the 114 Democrats that had signed a letter calling for this exact vote.
The Republicans are really showing that they have the right stuff in this budget fight thanks in large part to the Tea Party influence. The message is clear and even the Democrats have admitted it with this vote: It’s the Spending Stupid!
Most of those polled see through Bernanke’s and Geithner’s hysterics. As Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told MSNBC on Wednesday, “If we were never to raise the debt limit at all, the Treasury would still take in 70% of all the money they planned to spend in the form of tax revenue,” which is “more than 10 times the revenue needed to avoid a default.“
Toomey explained that while a partial government shutdown would occur if the debt ceiling were not raised, the catastrophe of a default wouldn’t take place.
This just goes to show the depths to which the Obama Administration will go. They are claiming that failing to raise the debt ceiling automatically means the US will Default on its debt obligations. This is just plain Bovine Excrement as Pat Toomey correctly points out.
Elsewhere I have argued that Obama = George W. Bush simply because Obama keeps sticking with Bush’s policies on just about everything … except deficit spending where he has chosen to be more like George on Steroids.
So it must come as good news to the lefties that there is an opposing view of just who Obama is patterning himself after. Here’s the highlights:
Gas prices are heading toward $5, single-family home sales are at a low—and with President Obama ignoring his base like Jimmy Carter did, he could end up being another one-term president, Eric Alterman writes.
Can You Spell “M-A-L-A-I-S-E?”
Hmm. Malaise? Yea, that is sounding familiar. Just look around you.
Stylistically speaking, Barack Obama could hardly be further from Jimmy Carter if he really had been born in Kenya. Carter was a born-again Baptist who was raised on his father’s peanut plantation and supported George Wallace on the road to the Georgia state house. Barack Obama—well, you know the story. But the two men have a great deal in common in their approach to the presidency, and not one of these similarities is good news for the Democrats or even for America. Both men rule without regard to the concerns of the base of their party. Both held themselves to be above politics when it came to making tough decisions. Both were possessed with superhuman self-confidence when it came to their own political judgment mixed with contempt for what they understood to be the petty concerns of pundits and party leaders. And worst of all, one fears, neither one appeared willing to change course no matter how many storm clouds loomed on the horizon.
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Well that was the ‘70s, you say, and America is a different country these days. True enough, but while history never repeats itself, political patterns do. More and more, Democrats are starting to worry they that they have a more um, colorful version of Jimmy Carter on their hands. Obama acts cool as a proverbial cucumber but that awful ‘70s show seems frightfully close to a rerun.
Altman then goes on to list a number of key similarities he sees between Obama and Carter:
Rising gas prices.
The New York Times reports that, “New single-family home sales are now lower than at any point since the data was first collected in 1963, when the nation had 120 million fewer residents.”
Organized labor is losing patience with Obama as unemployment remains near 9% and he is pushing job killing trade agreements.
Low confidence in the President’s leadership or direction.
Altman writes, “Obama, like Carter, is reacting to these warning signs not by rallying his own side, or focusing on those aspects of his party’s platforms that remain popular, but by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans.”
Rather than taking these warning signs to heart and engaging his base, Obama is turning his back on his party’s platform by calling for less money in taxes and smaller cuts in defense. Carter on the other hand, “[Turned] his back on [Tip] O’Neill, his party and its primary constituencies, he accepted the Republican argument that the only way to solve the country’s economic problems was to attack the deficit.”
But Altman is not the only one noticing similarities to Jimmy Carter. Joseph Klein discusses another Carter similarity: Stagflation.
Can you say stagflation? The Jimmy Carter years may be repeating themselves as the Obama economy continues to flounder. U.S. economic growth slowed to a 1.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2011, after a 3.1 percent fourth quarter pace last year. Meanwhile, food and gasoline prices have sent the broad measure of inflation rising at its fastest pace in 2-1/2 years. To make matters worse, more people sought unemployment benefits last week. This was the second increase in applications for unemployment benefits in three weeks.Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke hinted yesterday that such disturbing news was in the offing, at the first scheduled press conference in the Fed’s history. But, no doubt in an effort to calm the markets, he played down the significance of the lower growth and higher inflation figures as transitory.
Bernanke did acknowledge, however, that inflation concerns would most likely keep the Fed from engaging in additional quantitative easing – i.e., printing money to spur growth – after the current round of $600 billion in Treasury securities purchases ends in June: “The trade-offs are getting harder at this point. Inflation is getting higher …“
