To elaborate on my point about obscenity, let’s talk about the national debt…
Right below that piece by Frank was one by Steny Hoyer, the Dancing Majority Leader. The topic was the national debt. And it was just as distorted by the partisan filter on thinking as the porn piece.
Rep. Hoyer dismisses the simplistic, Tea Party notion “that our budget deficit mess sprang into existence at the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.” But instead of giving us a real-world, helpful explanation of how we got to where we are, he gives us the Democratic Party playbook version: “But in truth, more than 90% of the projected deficit we will face over the next decade is the result of President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rescue of the financial sector he began in the last few months of his presidency…”
In other words, it’s that bad ol’ Bush and his bad ol’ war that we shouldn’t be fighting.
Only after getting that out of his system does he acknowledge, sort of as an afterthought, “… and lower revenues from the recession. And the greatest driver of our long-term deficit is rapidly growing entitlement and health-care spending.”
He tries, in the next paragraph, to be evenhanded:
Both parties must learn: What is politically easy is often fiscally deadly. It’s easier to hide the costs of war than to put those costs in front of the public. It’s easier to promise 95% of Americans that we won’t consider raising their taxes than to have a frank conversation about the realities of our balance sheet.
Nice try, but you’ll notice that his examples of what “both parties must learn” is not to do stuff that Republicans do. If he didn’t look at the world with donkey-colored glasses, he might have mentioned Bush’s expansion of the U.S. Department of Education, or the Medicare prescription drug benefit he didn’t bother to pay for. Rather than whining about how expensive it is to fight the War on Terror, he might have dwelt upon the fact that Mr. Bush expanded the federal gummint more than anyone since Lyndon Johnson.
But partisans just can’t bring themselves to do that.
Although as far as the deficit is concerned we were reducing it by the end of the Clinton administration, the fact is that neither party is sinless in this matter, and all of us are going to have to pay for refusing to put our representatives feet to the fire to fix it. We’ve known for several administrations that we need to do something about Social Security. We know, or should know, that if you are going to have a war you have to pay for it. The only way out of this is to raise taxes and cut entitlements. I don’t like this any better than the next person, but I recognize that it has to be done, and the sooner the better!
> In other words, it’s that bad ol’
>Bush and his bad ol’ war that we
>shouldn’t be fighting.
If we’re going to have a war, we should actually have Congress declare war and determine how to pay for it by sacrificing other spending.
Otherwise, it just becomes a way to keep the profits flowing to defense contractors.
There are all sorts of ways to stimulate the economy.
Anybody who questions the costs of war and argues that those costs (both in human lives and in financial terms) need to be front-and-center, constantly debated and evaluated…is not “whining.” They are, rather, patriots, in the truest sense of the term.
One must view with suspicion any talk by Washington insiders about spending programs. Such talk is generally focused on how bad the other guys’ spending is, while our spending is always for virtuous reasons. Still, I’m surprised that you didn’t call out Karl Rove for his baldfaced lied that Obama added more to the deficit in his first 120 days than Bush did in all eight years. Or did you mention it and I didn’t catch it?
Doug, It’s also bad ol’ everyone else who wants entitilements, but doesn’t want to pay for ’em. Example: Lots of people object to “having” to get health insurance. After all, they can just go to the emergency room if they get hurt or very sick, right? Wrong! We already pay for that in our taxes and in our insurance premiums (for those of us who have insurance). We need to pay for it sanely. I do not want to be tripping over dead bodies in the street, nor do I want a resevoir of disease percolating just under the surface of society, therefore I think we need universal health care, with the costs equitably paid for by those who can. I also have no problem with workfare for those able to work. Do we need to help out our senior citizens? Yes. (Disclaimer here: I am receiving social security.) We may have to curtail services. I recommend that we start by restricting services to those who have adequate other means of income If you want to stipulate that they get paid back what they paid into it that’s fine. I can’t add “with interest” because while they might have made a bundle if they’d invested wisely in the stock market, they might also have gone completely broke last year. However, it doesn’t take long before one has recouped all that one has paid into the system. Do we need to reduce the deficit? Fine! Let’s all chip in and reduce this debt. We can get it done, if we can overcome the greed factor.
Amen 1,000 times Karen. You couldn’t be more on the mark.
Brad’s post hits on the big problem. Both sides see what the other side is doing as not worthwhile and thus simply a budget-buster. Meanwhile what they themselves are doing is worthwhile and therefore the effects on the deficit are but a mere unfortunate side effect to a necessary action.
That’s not exactly a good climate for making tough choices in solving a difficult problem.
Woe, I say!
Here’s the rub, as I see it: the Democrats are forced to overstate their case to balance out the relentless hyperbole from the Republicans.
When they don’t, they get blamed for being ineffective.
Mama Warthen, if you want us to stop fighting, you’ll have to make sure that the bullying sib is stopped first.
Oh, really? And who would that be? The carriers of Bush Derangement Syndrome or the Birthers?
One of the most amazing things about folks who adhere to one party or the other is the conceit that it is SO obvious that the OTHER side is in the wrong, an objective observer couldn’t help but agree.
Sorry, but the “You Lie!” Republicans are no more given to unwarranted hyperbole than are the “Bush Lied” Democrats. To suggest otherwise is absurd…
Do we have to rehash the whole “Bush Lied” thing? [yawn] That is a credible position taken by many sane people–perhaps more accurately stated as “Bush knew or should have known that there were no WMD in Iraq.”
Saying that Obama is not a citizen flies in the face of hard, cold documentary evidence that no reasonable person would dispute.
And yet… and mind you, I’m bending way backward to be the devil’s advocate here… the birthers are trying, in a ridiculously literal, ham-handed way, to get a true thing that bother them: Obama is different.
He’s not different because he’s black; if he were black it would all be simple. He’s just very different, from other politicians and certainly from anyone who has been president of the United States.
He is a disjointed person, who grew up partly in the rather unique (among American states) environment of Hawaii, always feeling deprived from not having his foreign father in his life, and partly in Indonesia with a foreign stepfather. He self-identifies as black, yet was raised mostly by whites in a place where the concept of “black” as the term is used in the lower 48 has very little meaning.
Most of us think this is great, very cool — the first post-racial president. But one wonders, is there a time when you get something really different (and not in a good way) in a president with such a different background?
I’m sort of different from the average American myself (this morning I heard a lecture about homeless children, and when it was mentioned that they sometimes attend two or three schools in a year, people gasped — and yet I did that, more than once, and sometimes the schools were not conducted in the same language). This inspired me to write my “Barack Like Me” column. But… when I lived in the Third World, even when I learned to speak Spanish without an accent, there was never the slightest doubt that I was a American, a gringo, the son of an officer in the U.S. Navy, something that gave me a very firm sense of who I was — while I might not be like someone who has spent his life in West Columbia, I was most assuredly an American, in heritage and worldview. (That difference between me and Obama inspired me to write the sequel to that “Barack Like Me” column, the one in which I identified just as strongly with John McCain.)
But different strokes, right? Yes, certainly.
But just recently, I read a piece by Charles Krauthammer that seemed to point to a way that Obama’s difference played out in an approach to the presidency different from that of any other president in my lifetime. And rather than being cool and affirming and all that, it was disturbing. It was the speculation that the president sent that valuable bust of Winston Churchill back to Britain because he doesn’t have the importance of the “special relationship” saturating his bones. To him, it was suggested, Churchill wasn’t the man who saved the West from the Nazi horror by inspiring Britain to stay in the fight until we could step in and tip the balance. To him… he was the guy who was PM when his grandfather was imprisoned for political reasons by British authorities in Kenya.
Fascinating….
Anyway, I think that’s what the Birthers are trying, in their own pathetic way, to get at.
Right, but do you not concede that in terms of hyperbole and lack of rational support for their actual position, they take the cake?
Kathryn, for lack of rational support, nobody outdoes the faked moon landings conspiracists.