There's something so "aw, gee!" about the Speaker's latest remarks on the state of his party.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he believes the primary goal of President Obama’s second term is to “annihilate the Republican Party.” ...The Hill
Wrong, of course. The news is even worse than that. President Obama, a confirmed institutionalist, knows that the current edition of the Republican party is a mockery of the actual party. Republicans used to be pretty respectable as a party. More to the point, they used to be self-respecting. The cringes of the old-timers -- a group of Republican senators who got the hell out during and following the Gingrich revolution -- were obvious. The tea party invasion pretty much finished the party off.
So people like John Boehner have to lie -- loudly to all of us, and quietly to himself and his colleagues -- to survive.
For example:
“In our meetings before Christmas, the president was so tired of me talking about when we were going to deal with an entitlement crisis that he looked at me and said: ‘Boehner, we don’t have a spending problem. We have a healthcare problem.’ It gives you some idea of the challenge that we’re facing,” Boehner said.
“For a guy who’s run up the deficit 60 percent — 60 percent of the deficit has occurred under his watch — when you see this, and then you hear him say: ‘I am not going to negotiate on the debt limit. I am not going to deal with the debt limit. That’s Congress’s problem!’ … Frankly, I think it’s irresponsible.” ...The Hill
About that ongoing problem with debt...
I'm going to post this 2007 House Budget Committee and the Joint Economic Committee chart with the additional information that the debt has actually decreased during the Obama administration (first four years) every damn time I hear about someone like Boehner trying to sell the lie.
Oh, and the Financial Times' Martin Wolf (h/t Paul Krugman) pulls back the curtain of lies. He reports on our economic situation -- telling us exactly what's happening in reality. That's reality, friend, not the world of Boehner and Ryan and ... well, you know.
The most obvious source of trouble is our health care -- our "inefficient" health care system. Leakage all over the place. If you've ever taken a hard look at your health care bills, you'll find a) profiteering, and b) inefficiency -- in spades. It's the lousiest health care system I've ever experienced. But even if that were only one person's experience, we have to face the rest of Wolf's analysis.
"The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy," says Wolf. "If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down."
Hey, it's not that we're dumb. Not all of us, anyway. Hard facts are the last things the profiteers (including no small number of members of Congress) want us to have. That holds with our health care spending, our defense spending and ... on and on and on.
And maybe we really don't want to know.
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