Boehner versus Barry!

The debt debate continues, with many twists and turns and just as many machinations. Here are some great sources to understand the issue, and provide a conservative response to liberal critics:

Michael Medved addresses the McConnell plan and why ol’ Mitch thought it was a good idea.

McConnell’s proposal seems to place showmanship over substance, politics over policy. If Republicans voted for it, they would seem to announce: “We’ll give Obama the debt increases he wants, and we don’t care how it busts the budget; our main concern is that we’re able to pin the blame squarely on the president and go on record as voting against it.”

Medved’s alternative answer is a sound one:

To avoid this outcome, the House of Representatives must act within a few days to pass its own version of a debt-ceiling increase—featuring major and immediate budget cuts, no tax hikes, and some form of spending caps or balanced-budget amendment. Send meaningful legislation to the Senate, which can pass its own version of more borrowing authorization, and then let the two houses negotiate with each other to put something on the president’s desk before Aug. 2. If Obama follows through on his veto threats,  it will be harder for him to blame anyone else for catastrophic consequences.

Read Medved’s entire article here.

One complaint from Obama that is repeated often and augmented in his captive media is that the Republicans have no plan. This is patently false, as they’ve already passed a budget in the house that was defeated in the Senate. Further, the reason that Boehner and Cantor demand actual detailed cuts instead of vague promises from the President is provided by a recent look into budget history:

In 1982, President Reagan negotiated a deficit reduction plan with tax increases that initially appeared to be $1 of taxes for every $3 of spending cuts.  Guess what?  The reverse was enacted into law, with $3 of tax increases for $1 of spending cuts.  In 1990, President “No New Taxes” H.W. Bush negotiated a similar deal, with similar results.  Democrats back-load spending cuts in the far out years, for tax increases today.  Let’s look at today’s news.  I guarantee that in Obama’s $4 trillion of deficit reduction, 90% of spending cuts occur ten years from now.   Boehner and Cantor have learned an important lesson from history.

Read more from Ricochet here.

The best critique (as is often the case) comes our good friend, Charles “the KROWT!” Krauthammer:

All of a sudden he’s a born-again budget balancer prepared to bravely take on his own party by making deep cuts in entitlements. Really? Name one. He’s been saying forever that he’s prepared to discuss, engage, converse about entitlement cuts. But never once has he publicly proposed a single structural change to any entitlement.

He then provides his own answer, similar to Medved’s:

A long-term deal or nothing? The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term debt-ceiling hike of $500 billion containing $500 billion in budget cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something larger.

The president says he wants tax reform, doesn’t he? Well, Mr. President, here are five months to do so.

Will the Democratic Senate or the Democratic president refuse this offer and allow the country to default — with all the cataclysmic consequences that the Democrats have been warning about for months — because Obama insists on a deal that is 10 months and seven days longer?

That’s indefensible and transparently self-serving. Dare the president to make that case. Dare him to veto — or the Democratic Senate to block — a short-term debt-limit increase.

Read the the KROWT’s article here.

Jonah Goldberg shows how Obama is the real ideologue, all the while blaming the Republicans for being so.

Obama says that Republicans are rigid ideologues because they won’t put “everything on the table.” Specifically, they won’t consider tax hikes, even though polls suggest Americans wouldn’t mind soaking “the rich,” “big oil” and “corporate jet owners.”

But Obama hasn’t put everything on the table either. He’s walled off “ObamaCare” and the rest of his “winning the future” agenda.

Read the entire article here.

The MESSAGING

The wretched part of it is that his narcissistic solipsistic rhetoric is working simply because the GOP is so bad at messaging, and the media is in Obama’s pocket. He says such idiotic things despite his being the worst transgressor of the invective he hurls at the GOP because no one questions him on it, and the GOP is terrible at arguing back.

I think we should get ready for the GOP to cave. If they perceive that the public is against them because they are bamboozled by Obama’s constant demagoguery and the media’s encouragement, there’s little reason for them to stick to principles that will get them tossed out of office.