In the old Roadrunner cartoons, Wiley Coyote never did learn
his lesson about reckless behavior around precipitous drops, railroad tunnels
or dangerously balanced giant boulders.
He was constantly crushed, flattened, trampled and blown-up as a result
of his idiotic, simple-minded persistence toward accomplishing one goal; to kill the
Roadrunner. Sound familiar?
As the media resounds with ominous warnings and sincere and
earnest sounding attempts to warn us all of the looming catastrophe,
republicans are acting as if they won the recent election and hold all the
cards in what is supposed to be an honest and transparent negotiation over
cutting the deficit. Never mind that the
deficit is an enormous, steaming pile of hokum, a fantastic boogey-man dreamed
up by conservative intelligencia terrified at the prospect of a nation not
ruled by them and their fat-cat, mostly white, mostly rich brethren to frighten
the ignorant about a danger that doesn’t really exist. Robert Reich, a very bright guy, has been attempting
to make the point that the so-called fiscal cliff is nothing but a republican
obsession that completely misses the point and he hasn’t gotten much
traction.
It’s not the fixation with the deficit itself that is so
repugnant; that’s just another in a long line of mistaken priorities and
take-your-eye-off-the-ball-isms that have characterized the republican right
for the last forty years – a highly developed aptitude for consistently being
on the wrong side of history, whether it’s foreign policy and over-hyped danger
from sinister enemies like an about-to-collapse Russia in the Eighties, the
Sandinistas and Saddam Hussein right on through to gay marriage and the war on
drugs. It’s the nature of conservatives
to want to keep things the way they are most comfortable – like it's Alabama in 1961.
Now, rather than engaging in an honest effort to heal the
country and solve some problems, they are simply reverting to their historical
talking points – tax breaks for “job creators”, an end of regulation to allow
unfettered exploitation of resources, the destruction of unions and the general
maintenance of a royalist oligarchy inhabited by…well, them.
One lesson they seemed to have learned from the election, at
least temporarily, is that the dependence on angry social conservatives to
carry their flag only succeeded in having that banner planted on a tiny little irrelevant
corner of the country where nobody gives a shit. They have adopted at least the appearance of
regret over all of the hatred they so recently were encouraging and are making
friendly noises about immigration reform and changing their misogynistic positions
on women’s issues, if for no other reason than self preservation as a viable
political institution. I find it damning
that they are – in 2012 – adapting to a reality that has been in place for at
least twenty-five years but again, that’s the nature of conservatism. I would have expected that anyone proposing
that women get raped because they were asking for it somehow would have been
tarred and feathered and run out of the party long ago – it makes these
concessions sound to me like a liberalization of convenience, but that remains
to be seen.
Today the news was full of reports of John Boner’s deep
disappointment with the Obama administration’s latest proposal for resolving
the issues that he and his boneheaded colleagues packed in dynamite and lit the
fuse on 6 months ago, thinking that Obama was dead in the water and their
nominee was going to be a shoe-in. They
were never serious about any negotiation over their big, bad deficit – it was a
party drunk of the fermented tea of a truck load of hopped-up freshmen
representatives bent on changing the world to fit their peculiar vision. Now that they have been repudiated in a
landslide election debacle, they don’t have any intelligent plan. Their plan consists of “you give us
everything we want or you aren’t serious about solving the country’s problems”
rhetoric and constant pleas for the president to engage in honest negotiation,
as if they’re waiting patiently for him to finish his breakfast and get down to
business. From what I can see, all their
talk about “accepting revenue increases” comes down to stripping the middle
class of their only tax break – the mortgage interest deduction – and some
cockamamie gibberish about limiting charitable deductions for the rich – a
completely tone-deaf and comical idea that would accomplish very little except
to demonize the poor and underprivileged and deprive them of even their current
pathetic lot in life. Nice idea...
Meanwhile, Romney has lunch with Obama today, and the mind
reels with comic possibilities over that one.
Then Mitt went down to Capitol Hill to drop in on his android-like
running mate, the intellectual core of the party, a man who can reach across
the aisle, a man who specialized in bald-faced lying during the campaign and
was lucky to hold onto his seat in the house, Paul “Lyin’ Ryan. They were supposed to be meeting so that Romney
and he could discuss substantive issues related to the deficit impasse but I
say they sat awkwardly in fat leather chairs for 15 minutes sipping gin and
then quickly hit the hand sanitizer hoping never to see each other again. It’s not like there were ever any reports of
them bonding on the campaign bus.
And finally we have the spectacle of Mitch McConnell, the
single most treacherously partisan human in the congress, yammering on about
the seriousness of the situation and doing back-flips to avoid any increase in
tax rates for his chosen constituency – the .1%. He wants no part of Obama’s own ideas for
solving the make believe crisis – he wants him to propose “solutions” that
republicans can accept – in other words, to do what he wants him to do. It’s preposterous but the guy is relentless
and has absolutely no shame – he should be tried for treason as soon as
possible.
Going back to Mr. Reich, he is correct in stating that the
whole narrative around the “looming fiscal cliff” is a bunch of nonsense and
that we should take advantage of historically low rates, borrow even more money
and get people working again – that’s the only thing that is going to jump
start the economy – not some arm-wrestling contest over an esoteric notion
like the deficit that, if Faux News would just shut up about it, no one would
care about.
Obama has all the cards, though, and if he just stays firm,
maybe we can avoid driving the economy back into a recession by doing precisely
the wrong thing at the wrong time. Play the ace of trumps, Barack…
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