7/14/2011

Republican Intransigence, as Revealed Through Republicans in Conservative Media:
Mad dog Representative Michele Bachmann, out of all the teabaggers in Congress, has a bigger microphone since she's running for president. So, of course, she gets lots of air time when she says that she won't vote to raise the debt ceiling. Or, as she modified her stance, "They'd have to cut an enormous amount, including they would have to defund Obamacare." She said this on Fox "news" (motto: "Dear God, don't let anyone have hacked phones over here").

This follows a pattern for most right-wingers, who do much of their posturing and politicking primarily in conservative media outlets. To wit:

Representative Mike Pence on Fox "news": "House Republicans believe that the pathway forward is to cut spending now more than a dollar for any increase in the debt ceiling; it means putting statutory caps on the books. And I believe that any increase in the debt ceiling should be contingent on sending a Balanced Budget Amendment to the states. So those are the conditions."

Representative Paul Broun on his bill to lower the debt ceiling by $1.3 trillion, in the National Review's The Corner (motto: "The ghost of William F. Buckley keeps trying to kill itself again every time he reads this"): To be realistic, we can’t lower the debt limit today, but if we set a deadline, the beginning of FY 2012, it would force politicians to make those decisions in the months to come." Fiscal year 2012 starts on October 1, 2011.

Representative Todd Akin, writing in Big Government (motto: "Andrew Breitbart is watching you"), brags that he's voted "no" on raising the debt ceiling the last seven times: "I believe that we should also pass a Constitutional amendment to cap the size of the federal government and tie it to a percentage of our gross domestic product (GDP)." Which, of course, means that the government can never pass a stimulus spending plan.

And this list could go on with more (almost exclusively) white dudes who have had enough of all this spendin'.

When President Obama finally told House Majority Leader that "Enough is enough" yesterday, it was partially over Republicans' refusal to deal fairly and realistically with what are proving to be worthless negotiations. It was also that Cantor is just a penis with glasses. Obama refused a short-term deal, but Cantor kept bringing it up, like the noodge that he is. So the President walked away rather than pimp-slap Cantor.

We can only hope that Obama's supposed declaration of "I've reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this" is true. We can only hope that it's the start of some new path for him, some utter abandonment of the bipartisan snipe hunt he's been on. Perhaps it's too late. Perhaps he's too far into the woods to find his way home.

But stupid optimism is what makes us American. And it's that stupidity that made so many Americans elect this actually dangerous group of people. There is no Forrest Gump-wisdom in the dimwitted. There's only the horrible consequences of their actions.