Obama recently demagogued Republicans by asking, “Can they say yes to anything?”
And to put it terms that your brainwashed partisan ideologues will understand, Barry Hussein, “Yes we can!”
We said yes to the Ryan budget. In fact we passed it. Unlike Democrats, who have not passed any kind of budget at all in something like 818 days.
We also said yes to the cut, cap and balance bill. We passed that, too. And Harry Reid refused to even allow it to come up for a vote, much less debate it.
Meanwhile, Democrats have not come up with any plan at all, aside from the Harry Reid plan that just came out a couple of days ago and which is 99% smoke and mirros, 1% “plan.” You also see in that article that John Boehner was willing to back an agreement that he had with Obama – and that OBAMA POISONED IT.
Boehner had agreed to a deal that would have involved $800 billion in “revenue” (i.e. TAXES). And then Obama demanded yet another $40o billion. The New York Times demonstrated just how chock full of chutzpah liberals are in saying (In an article entitled “The Party That Can’t Say Yes“):
“So, on the eve of economic calamity, the Republicans killed an overly generous deal largely over a paltry $400 billion in deductions.”
Number one, anybody who thinks $400 billion is “paltry” is psychologically and morally insane – and there is no point trying to negotiate with the insane. Number two, if $400 billion is indeed “paltry,” then surely Obama and the Democrats would have no problem agreeing to the same deal with “revenues” of $400 billion rather than $800 billion. It’s only a “paltry” difference, after all. Both points reveal that these liberals are dishonest and they are in fact sick.
I would submit that we are not negotiating with Democrats in this fight. They are utterly deceitful and not fit negotiating partners. We are trying to win the American people and get them on our side for 2012.
That matters far more than any deal we agree to now.
The media are dishonest in their presentation of the 1995 budget impasse, just as they are dishonest in everything else. The elections of 1996 wasn’t so bad for Republicans. They lost a few seats in the House, but still retained control of that body. And they actually GAINED two seats in the Senate which further solidified their control. Bill Clinton was also forced to say, “The era of big government is over.” And the Republican Congress ultimately forced a balanced budget (which the incredibly cynical and dishonest media gave Clinton total credit for). A good argument can be made that the balanced budgets that we had for a few years in the late 90s was entirely due to the pressure that the Republicans had applied in 1995.
But now aint then.
I would argue that the American people have become worse rather than better since 1995. As my major prima facia example, would this country have elected a Barack Obama in 1995? I don’t think there’s any chance. And it’s not Obama being black that would have destroyed his chances; it’s Obama being a socialist who had spent over 20 years in a racist, Marxist and anti-American “church” with a vile and twisted man like Jeremiah Wright as his “spiritual mentor.” And any conservative who is going to place their trust in the wisdom or goodness of the American people must deal with the sad reality that the American people elected a genuinely evil and foolish man to be their leader in 2008.
My own trust in the American people is quite limited. The Democrat Party tells demonstrable lies. The mainstream media propaganda machine packages those lies. And then ignorant and often stupid people consume them as “facts.” We’re in trouble because we’re succombing to our own rapidly increasing moral stupidity.
Let me say more about that right now.
In a fair and legitimate contest, if the American people were presented with two competing ideologies, agendas and plans, I still believe that the American people would choose the more noble path. But that is not what is happening here. Instead, Obama and the Democrats are not bothering to present a meaningful plan of their own which would expose their true nature and intentions to the people; rather, they are sitting back and demaoguing and demonizing the Republicans as they try to lead in the leadership vaccum created by failed leader Obama.
And up to this point, that tactic – as vile and despicable as it is – has actually been working. The American people are actually turning against the Republicans and taking their doses of poison that the biased and dishonest media keep feeding them. The media is simply routinely lying.
Obama is squarely to blame for this crisis and any disaster that ensues from it. He has utterly failed to lead. He has presented no plan. He has fearmongered this situation into a genuine crisis. It is because of Obama and his top officials constantly using the language of “default” that the credit rating agencies now feel compelled to lower our AAA rating. Anyone who takes the time to learn finds that:
A senior banking official told FOX Business that administration officials have provided guidance to them that even though a default is off the table, a downgrade “is a real possibility for no other reason than S&P and Moody’s have to cover (themselves) since they’ve [that’s Obama and Geithner] been speaking out on the debt cap so much.”
And Obama has revealed himself to be the worst possible form of demagogue. Even as he has constantly fearmongered this situation and constantly predicted doom to the public, he has been privately aggreeing with what Republicans have REPEATEDLY said that the United States would continue to pay its debts.
Now, if you have total confidence in the wisdom and goodness of the American people, I can understand why you believe they will see through this.
I simply no longer do. Because Obama played the same game with his terrible stimulus boondoggle; he played the same game with ObamaCare; and he has played the same game with virtually everything else he has done. And assuming the American people are stupid and selfish has worked for him since they proved that to be true by voting for him in the first place.
So the real battle here isn’t “who’s more conservative?” It’s more about, “What’s the most conservative plan that will win the day?” Charles Krauthammer has said we should vote for THE most conservative candidate or plan that has a reasonable chance to win. And I agree with that; otherwise the “perfect” becomes the enemy of the good. And the conservative agenda goes nowhere.
The rub is that we often don’t know the answer to the question, “Who is the most conservative candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning?” or “What is the most conservative plan that can actually pass?”
It’s easy to throw up a Christine O’Donnell or a Sharon Angle. You might dismiss them as “establishment conservatives,” but your Charles Krauthammers and your Karl Roves warned and predicted that they would lose badly and that in losing these races we would lose the United States Senate when we could have won it with more electable candidates. I also understand that it is equally easy to throw up your hands as a conservative and point out that if we don’t have good candidates who will actually be conservative, there’s not much point in their winning in the first place. I truly see both sides here – as I imagine you do.
Damn my lack of omniscience!
Is there any way out of this dilemma for ordinary conservatives and for conservative politicians alike?
I think there’s only one: trust your leadership and rally behind them.
If John Boehner isn’t “conservative” enough, he should have been replaced. But as it is, he’s what we’ve got; he’s who we have. And we either follow his lead or we disintergrate into a bunch of factions that cannot possibly succeed in anything.
Rep. Allen West (whom I really like, fwiw) publicly expressed an attitude that I share. He basically said that as a soldier you get behind your leaders’ plan and then you fight.
Even Rep. Allen West (R., Fla.), a freshman and tea-party favorite, told National Review Online that while the plan was a “75 to 80 percent solution,” it was something he could ultimately support. “You know, son, one thing they tell you in the military — if you sit around and wait to come up with the 100 percent plan, then the enemy has probably already attacked you,” he said.
The House has been leading. If you want conservative principles, there is simply nowhere else you can go if you want to have any chance of actually passing anything.
Speaker John Boehner is our General Eisenhower. If a bunch of officers had said, “I don’t like Ike’s plan; I’m going to hold out for a better one,” we would be speaking German right now.
When we are in a battle, what we really need most is unity. And that’s why I support my Republican House leadership through this fight.
For the record, I’m not saying Republicans should “compromise” with Democrats. I find Democrats utterly untrustworthy and in fact despicable; and you can’t “compromise” with vermin. What I AM saying is that Republicans should compromise with their own Republican leadership.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” And Abraham Lincoln said even more famously, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That idea is the core of my argument for supporting Speaker John Boehner.
I would rather have the cut, cap and balance plan than the one that Boehner is working on now. For the record, Speaker Boehner HIMSELF has repeatedly stated that HE would rather have the cut, cap and balance plan too. But he is looking at the situation, at the political landscape, at details that you and I don’t possess, and as our field commander he is saying that we need to pass a plan that will better position the Republican Party in this fight from the charge of being “hyper-partisan” or “unreasonable.”
And I am with my general in this fight.
For the record, had John Boehner decided that the cut, cap and balance plan was the hill to fight and die on, I would have been with him on that, too.
If the Tea Party conservative Republicans who oppose the Boehner plan successfully voted him out of his Speakership and replaced him, I would back that Tea Party conservative Speaker of the House.
But that isn’t what we’ve got. We’ve got Speaker of the House John Boehner, and our Speaker believes we need to get behind a plan that he acknowledges is less than perfect, but which he also says is our best chance of moving forward:
“Listen, it’s time to do what is doable, and this bill isn’t perfect. … That’s what happens when you have a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Democrat in the white House. This bill was agreed to by the bipartisan Senate leadership, and we believe we can get this on the president’s desk, and make it law. Listen, we’re not going to give him a $2.5 trillion blank check that lets him continue his spending binge through the next election. That’s not going to happen.”
I want the most conservative bill that has a chance of advancing or at least has the best chance of putting the Democrats in a political hole. And I believe that we need to trust the political instincts of our leadership to get us to that point.
Speaker Boehner is saying, “Get your ass in line.” And until this fight is over, I believe we should be saying, “Yes, sir!” Because the alternative is to splinter and divide into a bunch of factions that cannot accomplish anything.
Update: Boehner is arguing – legitimately – that there is going to be a debt deal one way or another. And if his play doesn’t work now, he will have no choice but to assemble a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans to pass the Reid bill in the Senate. If Boehner’s bill passes, that bill will have to be considered in any negotiation; if it fails, the House Republicans and the conservative agenda will have been become meaningless because it will be bypassed. There is simply too much at stake to play chicken, in my opinion. We’ve lost 500 points in the DOW already in just the first 4 days of the week BEFORE the deadline. August 2 will be a bloodbath.
If you believe that defeating John Boehner and fracturing the Republican House will lead to some kind of conservative agenda victory, you should be able to do something Obama hasn’t been able to come up with: a plan for how that will happen. If the markets collapse, a moderate coalition will form, pass something that is far worse than Boehner’s plan, and the House Republican leadership will be utterly broken with nearly a year and a half to go before the 2012 election.
John Boehner correctly recognizes that the House is one-half of one-third of our federal government; you simply cannot dictate the government from that foundation. It is simply lunacy at this point for a tiny minority of 26 Republicans to torpedo their party in a fanatic demand that they get 1,000% of everything they want. As it stands, Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are praying that the Boehner bill fails. Why on earth would Michelle Bachmann want to be the answer to these liberals’ prayers???
The US economy is quite probably the most vulnerable it has ever been in the history of the republic. Nobody knows what will happen in the coming weeks if we do not arrive at some kind of deal. The Boehner bill is the best solution possible for the nation, for the conservative agenda and for the Republican Party.
Start Thinking Right 