Prediction: Obama’s performance tonight is strong, so [conservative pundits] will pivot to attacking the crowd.
George Packer made several excellent points last night, one of which seems to be this morning’s emerging “serious person” consensus on the Giffords shooting and the political motivations (and their sources) that all-too-clearly underlie it:
It would be a kind of relief if Loughner operated not out of any coherent political context but just his own fevered brain.
Emphasis on coherent. Because it’s plain there are a number of right-wing talking points in this guy’s spew. Gold standard, government takeover, and other usual suspects have already emerged from his internet wake without the official investigation even getting started. But because the spew was most definitely a spew, and one that somewhat rarely qualified as English, well, those were just coincidental ravings of a lunatic and not something he heard repeatedly and then acted on. Just a lone nut, and both sides do it anyway.
Well, Cokie, Packer is ready for you:
…even so, the tragedy wouldn’t change this basic fact: for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words “treason” and “traitor.” The President isn’t a big-government liberal—he’s a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He’s also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.
Absolutely right. Just absolutely goddamned right. It is no coincidence that the entire week’s House agenda was instantly sidelined. Boehner and the rest knew the whole purpose of it was to create a hateful political sideshow. Sound and fury signifying nothing, but most certainly working to gin up some more fury. What’s the point of continuing with it if you can’t go before the microphone to talk about the coming tyranny? So that will just have to wait till next week. Because the Beltway media culture steadfastly refuses to learn from anything, least of all repeated, targeted domestic terror attacks. Time and time again, whether it be against the IRS, a member of Congress, government buildings, what have you, these are each dismissed as lone nuts operating on some incoherent babble and most definitely not taking marching orders from other lunatics that are routinely given the microphone on the most popular media outlets in the country. Don’t worry your pretty little head over the fact that their manifesto contains extensive quotes from Beck, Limbaugh, Bachman, Palin, whomever. That’s just incoherent ramblings. Both sides are equally guilty, and here’s an anonymous DailyKos comment that proves it.
“Fiscally responsible” is code for cutting taxes on rich people and gutting Social Security. Those are their goals, and that’s always been the case.
Well, I guess at least the GOP’s rampant and immediate hypocrisy is becoming something of a narrative over to the WaPo:
For two years, Cantor and his colleagues campaigned against high deficits. Now, in the new majority’s first major act, they plan to vote to increase the deficit by $143 billion as part of a repeal of health-care reform.
For two years, Cantor and his colleagues bemoaned the Democrats’ abuse of House rules to circumvent committees and to prevent Republicans from offering amendments. Now, Cantor confirmed on Tuesday, Republicans will employ the very same abuses as they attempt the repeal.
For two years, the Republicans complained about unrelenting Democratic partisanship. Now they’re planning no fewer than 10 investigations of the Obama administration, and the man leading most of those has already branded Obama’s “one of the most corrupt administrations” in history.
For two years, the Republican minority vowed to return power to the people. Now the House Republican majority is asking lobbyists which regulations to repeal, hiring lobbyists to key staff positions and hobnobbing with lobbyists at big-ticket Washington fundraisers.
Now, of course, Dana just can’t resist larding on a lot of straw man false-equivalency crap about being “just as arrogant and overreaching” as the recent Democrat Majority that was so clearly operated by and for Lord Satan. But I’ll take what I can get. The A|B comparison stuff runs first after all. And Lord Jesus and the MSM knows the innernets are making us stoopid and shortly as measured by span of attentions.
The Washington Post Editorial Board is beginning, beginning mind-you, to think that maybe the GOP isn’t quite so serious about deficits after all:
Deficit financing is fine, it seems, when it comes to tax cuts. But that’s not all. Under the new rules, not only are tax cuts exempted from the pay-go concept, but the only way to pay for spending increases is with spending cuts elsewhere. No tax increases allowed – not even in the form of eliminating loopholes or cutting back on tax breaks. Of course, if you wanted to expand the loopholes, no problem. No need to pay for that.
Having made clear that no tax cuts need be paid for, the rules then take the extra step of specifying which deficit-busting tax cuts the new majority has in mind. They assume the continuation of all the Bush tax cuts; extension of the new version of the estate tax; and the creation of a big tax break to let “small businesses,” which can be expansively defined, take a deduction equal to 20 percent of their gross income.
Tax cuts for the wealthiest are fully protected. But tax help for those at the other end of the income spectrum? Forget it.
Shocking stuff. Can’t be right…Seems like I read something, somewhere about this, a while back…but that must have been all wrong.
At any rate, that $4T can easily be made up by trimming waste, fraud, and abuse inherent in the discretionary, non-defense budget…which totals around$1.4T for 2010. So, cutting four times that amount (over 10 years, solely to pay for new deficit spending to protect tax cuts for the richest 2%, and most definitely not current levels which would also require similarly scaled cuts in the very same time-frame) shouldn’t be any big deal. And, of course, Boehner’s ~$30M cuts in the House member’s own budgets gets us 0.75% of the way there already.
Put it this way: suppose that from here on out we average 4.5 percent growth, which is way above any forecast I’ve seen. Even at that rate, unemployment would be close to 8 percent at the end of 2012, and wouldn’t get below 6 percent until midway through Sarah Palin’s first term.
He’s a bitter man now, who can barely tolerate the fact that he lost to Barack Obama. But he lost for an obvious reason: his campaign proved him to be puerile and feckless, a politician who panicked when the heat was on during the financial collapse, a trigger-happy gambler who chose an incompetent for his vice president. He has made quite a show ever since of demonstrating his petulance and lack of grace.
I can’t help but think that if news organizations put a tenth of the amount of effort into external linking that they do into re-reporting other people’s stories, we’d have a much more vibrant and useful news culture.
[President Obama] announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.
So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.
[…]
[He] apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. […] There were no comparable gestures from the other side. Instead, Senate Republicans declared that none of the rest of the legislation on the table — legislation that includes such things as a strategic arms treaty that’s vital to national security — would be acted on until the tax-cut issue was resolved, presumably on their terms.
CNN’s Brooke Baldwin: I will spare you the figures and the math [on deficit reduction] because it quite simply makes my eyes glaze over.
Malibu Stacy: Thinking too much gives you wrinkles
Lemkin 