White House Begins to Acknowledge Reality that GOP is Sabotaging Recovery

We need to be honest with the public. This election is about them, not us. And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, "Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job."... The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president...Our single biggest political goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful.
-Republican Senate minority leader Mich McConnell, in an interview during the 2010 elections.

Mitch McConnell said that?!?... He admitted that on the record?!? That is embarrassing. Can I just say for the record -- that is pathetic."
-Former GOP congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

It was embarrassing and pathetic. One election cycle had not yet come and gone and here was the GOP's top guy in the Senate, already working on the next. I can't think of a better example of the Republican Party's "permanent campaign" mode than McConnell's admission. It would be two years before the next election and, rather than focusing of governing, McConnell was concentrating on the 2012 presidential campaign. Want a recipe for disaster? There you go.

But of course the White House, being all post-partisan and above such trifling matters as political reality, pretty much ignored McConnell's confession. They would continue to reach across the aisle to try to work with Republicans and would continue to have their hand slapped back. Like a gambling addict plugging a slot machine, the president seemed trapped by his own losing streak and the belief that if he kept feeding the machine silver dollars, it would have to pay off eventually. Ok, so this time bipartisanship didn't work, but if he walked away, he was walking away from the one time -- perhaps the very next pull on that lever -- that it would.

Maybe it was the debt-limit fight that proved to Barack Obama that the machine he was playing was either rigged or broken. Or maybe there was some sort of Oval Office intervention. But the White House seems to have come to grips with reality; Republicans are only concerned about the elections and, since this is true, they have an actual disincentive to work with the president to solve real world problems for Americans.

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The Deficit isn't Caused by Jets Alone

I'm not sure what to think. On Monday, The Hill ran a piece reporting the White House had basically caved on the Bush tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans.

The White House, seeking an agreement to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by Aug. 2, on Monday said it would not insist that any deal include an end to former President George W. Bush’s controversial tax rates on the wealthy.

President Obama's tactics are coming into focus as he huddles with congressional leaders to try and break the deadlock on increasing the debt ceiling.

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The Bush Tax Cuts Failed. Period

It's a chart that's been making the rounds for a while now. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities graphed out the main drivers of current and projected deficits and came up with the following:



TARP, bailouts, the stimulus? Ain't crap. And the economic downturn didn't really make much of a dent. The big driver of current and future deficits are the Bush era tax cuts. Although the hole blown in the deficit by the cuts dwarfs them, it pays to point out that we fought two wars -- which Bush made sure were off-budget -- while giving people who could afford to help pay for those wars a free ride.

This isn't pie-in-the-sky liberal loopiness here. These are history, these are facts. We were told that tax cuts would help us "grow our way out of deficits." They didn't. Again, that is fact. We were told the tax cuts would give us a rollicking, healthy economy. Look around you. They failed. That is a fact. In short, every argument in favor of the cuts has failed to materialize. The Bush tax cuts are -- as a simple matter of historical fact -- a complete failure. They are currently zombie policy; dead arguments, inexplicably still shambling around, serving no actual, real world purpose and feeding off the public dime.

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