Total Collapse
First, Paul Krugman, then me. I don't have it in me to make any clever remarks about the budget "deal," so just read the words of the master:
Well, there you go. Bush at his stupidest never utterly abandoned every principle that his party claimed to stand for in order to surrender utterly to a corrupt, destructive plan of the other party. Of course, Democrats don't have such destructive plans, or at least they didn't until we were foolish enough to fall for Barack Obama.
Bush managed to be the worst President in history by being the most corrupt, the most ignorant and the most incompetent President ever, all at once. No one is going to accuse Obama of being ignorant or corrupt (well, except our wingnut friends who do it every day,) but he has now established that, in the category of incompetence, he is easily Bush's equal.
A couple of decades from now, when people look back at how the United States declined so spectacularly from the greatest democracy in the history of the world, to a miserable, poverty-riddled third world rathole, Obama has now made sure that he can share the credit equally with Bush and Cheney.
So much for our "Socialist" President.
"The President Surrenders...the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t."
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t."
Well, there you go. Bush at his stupidest never utterly abandoned every principle that his party claimed to stand for in order to surrender utterly to a corrupt, destructive plan of the other party. Of course, Democrats don't have such destructive plans, or at least they didn't until we were foolish enough to fall for Barack Obama.
Bush managed to be the worst President in history by being the most corrupt, the most ignorant and the most incompetent President ever, all at once. No one is going to accuse Obama of being ignorant or corrupt (well, except our wingnut friends who do it every day,) but he has now established that, in the category of incompetence, he is easily Bush's equal.
A couple of decades from now, when people look back at how the United States declined so spectacularly from the greatest democracy in the history of the world, to a miserable, poverty-riddled third world rathole, Obama has now made sure that he can share the credit equally with Bush and Cheney.
So much for our "Socialist" President.
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