Shutdowns, Budgets, and Babies

Shutdowns, Budgets, and Babies

THE DEAL: The devil always lurks in the dirty details and, as specifics emerge on last Friday night’s eleventh hour settlement of the budget stalemate and threat of a government shutdown, it’s becoming clearer by the day that Republicans were snookered–again. President Barack Hussein Obama may have been the primary snookerer but Speaker John Boehner earned the prize as head of the snookered.

It was made to appear by both sides of the aisle that the spirit of compromise, the essence of politics, carried the night. By Saturday, the president was taking credit for cutting spending by “historic” amounts, the GOP was gloating that it had cut $38.5 billion from a bloated budget, and there was peace and tranquility on Capitol Hill.

Call it smoke and mirrors or compromise, it all boils down to distortions and lies.

Obama was hauled kicking and screaming to the cuts, the Republicans had sold out their original demands for $100 billion in spending, the deficit had already increased 15.7% or by $829 billion in the first half of fiscal 2011, the IMF is issuing warnings on the credibility of America’s borrowing, and the GOP demonstrated by its capitulation on Friday that all its noises about cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security entitlements and the nation’s crippling $14 trillion long-term public debt were just that, noises lacking substance.

The party of fiscal integrity has lost one more strategic battle and its general, John Boehner, in office twenty years now, has proven he is just another old Washington hack, part of the problem devoid of any solutions.

It will be a busy, and challenging, rest of the week for the Speaker. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4127)