Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Cue the RINO cries.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/01/frum.debt.republicans/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

 

Your definition of "plenty" is spurious, at best.

Moreover, I'm pretty damn sure that there weren't 1,000 small-town newspaper editors falling over themselves to give fawning coverage to a handful of "liberals" protesting the Iraq war, as they have done for even the smallest of Tea Party rallies. To say nothing, of course, of having their own friggin' TV network, as the Tea Party does.

But I'm sure YF will be along shortly to complain some more about the hideous liberal media.

 

But she didn't.

And Cindy Sheehan did receive plenty of attention at one point. Much of it -- though granted, not all of it -- cast her as a laughingstock at best and a traitor at worst. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been much, if any, coverage that has dismissed the Tea Party as traitors, despite the fact that much of what they advocate is in fact the destruction of the country.

No one's saying dissent just sprung up in January 2009. We're just saying that's when it started being patriotic again.

 

Yeah, boy, that column really sucked, huh?

I swear, the only thing that seems to matter anymore is if you're so ideological and passionate - in other words, half past nuts - that nobody could even think of accusing you of an ulterior motive. Never mind that a good chunk of the people who act like this actually <i>have</i> an ulterior motive - think talk radio and Fox News. You just have to act like you don't.

Acting too pure for this world has always sent alarm bells off for me. Always. I naturally distrust the kook in the fast-food store who absolutely loses it. That their mechanism for getting what they want. It's a matter of will. You have to match that will like an adult would. Sadly, most of the adults seem so enamored with the deluded nature of some politician that they've given in a begrudging respect. Which is akin to not firing the employee who vandalizes equipment just to show everybody how mad he is.

 

It became that because Fox News and talk radio said it was. They didn't create the Tea Party, but they guaranteed its success.

People looking to politicians as the source of power for the Republican Party are wasting their time. It's Fox and radio. Period. More the radio. Put the Fairness Doctrine back on the radio, and this conversation never happens.

 

I just wonder how many litmus tests you have to pass to be a true GOPer these days.

 

There was a time when my departure from the GOP started after agreeing to what Frum, who is a mainstream Republican by most reasonable definitions of such, is saying here. The discussion between the parties would start with "OK, we all agree with this, so where do we go from here?" And from there, the party differences became evident.

Nowadays, these really simple observations he's making here have sort of been lost in the shuffle. The discussion starts and end with a series of false premises. And now, the common sense stuff like this is being presented as a sort of an alternative view both to where the Republican Party's mainstream ideology is and how this whole episode is being perceived.

It should not be an arguable point that jobs are more important at this point than debt. But most of this debate has been built on the faulty premise that resolving the debt is somehow the route to solving unemployment (it will actually likely make it worse).

The conversation should start with the basic understanding that the bad economy helped cause the debt and the debt did not cause the bad economy. But that's not the way most people would perceive it the way this thing has played out.

Etc., etc.

Again, Frum knocked it out of the park. Back when I dabbled in the political game, working with people from both parties, Frum was the kind of conservative who I would not have hesitated to work with. When you are working and dealing with politics locally -- both locally in terms of local governing bodies and in terms of local officials in national bodies (congressmen, senators) -- you tend to see the candidates more in term of things like competency and effectiveness than you do ideological leanings. Frum is a guy I'd trust being involved in decision making because he is level-headed and does due diligence, on top of being pretty sharp.

 

I know I'll come across as partisan here, but Frum's take, to me, hardly "knocked it out of the park." At what point were "massive government budget cuts" on the table? Our federal government had outlays of something on the order of $3.45 trillion for FY 2010. Over the next 10 years, total outlays are (or were) projected to be $46 trillion. The total dollar value of all coming cuts -- both those already "found" and all those to be found by the congressional committee -- is to be $2.4 triillion. So the total percentage of cuts is (drum roll) approximately 5%. You call that a massive cut?

 

Was getting ready to post something very similar.

Spending continues to grow. All we're cutting is 5% or so of planned spending.

Deficit spending continues and the debt only grows.

We have a lot more work to do.

 

CNN just had a broad on saying that a drop from AAA to AA credit won't be devastating, just an across the board 1/4 to 1/2 percent interest rate hike. She compared the early 80s where interest rates were at 16 percent to now where they are 2 percent.

I don't think much at all was done today. The upper 3 percent won, the banks won. And Obama just got pistol-whipped. And the shocking thing of that is that so many here who said the tea party was a joke and the GOP a regional party in 2008 just had their asses handed to them in less than a presidential term. I almost feel sorry for Obama personally.

 

Cue Tony Montana: "It's your tree, Frank. You're sitting in it."

 

Yikes!