First, I don't buy the argument that "government shutdowns" outrage the people -- this is classic Beltway CW (see, for example, Brit Hume's recent comments about this -- "Republicans always thake the "blame" for shutdowns"). In fact, the vast majority of the public barely notices any shutdown -- and rightly so, as there never HAS been a real "shutdown"; only a few bureaucrats furloughed for a few days. The only people outraged by the "shutdowns" are fans of government, and that includes virtually all of the east coast media. If the shutdowns are so harmful to the GOP, why did we just sweep the recent mid-term elections?
Second, again the Beltway CW claims that the public "wants the parties to work together to accomplish something." No they don't -- as Rush has eloquently pointed out, the electorate wants the Obama-Socialist agenda defeated. If it takes a shutdown to do that in part, so be it. Once again, it's the media that peddles this crap.
Finally, the article attributes to Obama and his minions an intelligence and cunning that they do not possess. This idea that Obama is some evil liberal mastermind is a total crock. He cannot think his way out of a paper bag and does not know how to effectively respond to any political crisis, as this Gruber-gate stuff has clearly demonstrated. Obama is acting exactly as one would expect him to -- like the petulant, obnoxious brat that he is.
This is what passes for political analysis. Pathetic.
"Anxieties within the GOP over a possible government shutdown in the wake of Obama’s promise to push amnesty by unconstitutional executive order continue to grow. Those anxieties don’t show much confidence in the American voter.
The fear appears to be that voters will punish the GOP in two years for opposing Obama’s open tyranny. In other words, GOP leaders think the American people prefer unconstitutional government to a limited government shutdown aimed at stopping it. If that is true, American democracy is as degraded as Jonathan Gruber’s infamous remarks suggest.
In a healthy democracy, politicians wouldn’t even debate whether or not to fund an unconstitutional order. They would automatically defund it. That GOP leaders turn to pollsters and image consultants before deliberating on such a fundamental issue is already a bad sign. By saying in effect that they will lose their power if they defend the Constitution, they reveal the emptiness of that power.
And it is not even clear if they are correct in thinking that principled opposition constitutes bad politics. The government shutdown of 2013 obviously didn’t impede GOP success. It may have contributed to it. In any case, it is hard to see how a refusal to fund Obama’s illegal amnesty could prove more dangerous than that shutdown.
If Obama insisted on rejecting all funding of the government until Congress financed his law-breaking, even the liberal media would find that hard to spin as a frivolous GOP-forced shutdown. Perhaps anticipating the difficulty of defending his intransigence where his legal authority is nil, papers like the Washington Post are warning him against the amnesty order......"