Commentary By Ron Beasley
It would seem the Republicans just can't help but supply the Democrats with great campaign material. First we had Rep. Joe Barton apologize to BP because Obama was mean to them. He was forced to apologize for his apology in order to keep his committee position. But the top House Republican, Rep. John Boehner, may have just supplied the Democrats with even more campaign material. He said that Obama was good for the GOP and in the process explained what the Republicans will do if they retake the House. I suspect he may have it backwards - the Republicans are good for the Democrats.
"They're snuffing out the America that I grew up in," Boehner said. "Right now, we've got more Americans engaged in their government than at any time in our history. There's a political rebellion brewing, and I don't think we've seen anything like it since 1776."
Now maybe things were different in the middle of the country but Boehner is only three years younger than I am and the country I grew up in was the New Deal country. As Salon points out this was a country of:
......high taxes, mass unionization and vast federal infrastructure and
anti-poverty programs, along with segregation and pervasive racism, wars
in Korea and Vietnam, and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.
Also there were "beatniks." It's unclear what aspects of that America
the Democrats are attempting to snuff out, and which aspects are worthy
of being saved from said snuffing.
But it just gets better when he starts to explain what the Republicans will do.
Boehner criticized the financial regulatory overhaul compromise reached last week between House and Senate negotiators as an overreaction to the financial crisis that triggered the recession. The bill would tighten restrictions on lending, create a consumer protection agency with broad oversight power and give the government an orderly way to dissolve the largest financial institutions if they run out of money.
"This is killing an ant with a nuclear weapon," Boehner said. What�s most needed is more transparency and better enforcement by regulators, he said.
That's right - everything fine, no financial reform required. Obama is just being mean to the Wall Street Banksters. But this is bound to be his most popular suggestion - cut Social Security to pay for unpopular endless war.
Ensuring there's enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country's entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he'd favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.
Now like Joe Barton's BP comments everything Boehner said is what the Republican Party believes. But if they really want to win they are not supposed to say it.
>> Ensuring there's enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country's entitlement system, Boehner said.
ReplyDeleteLike I said under Steve's post yesterday:
The only reason the serious people have now myopically defined the problem as being Taliban 'insurgents', rather than as simply a need to defend US territory from terrorist acts, is because the American people have been conditioned not to question the cost and effectiveness of 'the US military hammer'.
Whenever any of us do point out that these two wars of aggression are unaffordable, ineffective, and immoral means of maintaining our nation's safety, rather than viewing us as advocates for a less expensive and more effective way of solving the nation's security problems, 'the serious people' simply accuse us of being unpatriotic for not 'supporting our troops'. I'm convinced they take this tack simply because they want to spend trillions of dollars, and the use of measures other than military agression would make that more difficult.
Boehner just supplied one of the main reasons they want to spend trillions of dollars on unnecessary, ineffective wars -- to force the country to cut entitlements like Social Security.