Posted on 12/07/2012 7:53:59 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Back during the 2008 Democratic primaries, Rush Limbaugh launched Operation Chaos. Four years later, President Barack Obama has embarked on Operation Humiliation.
It is coming off without a hitch.
Stage One was to dispatch his treasury secretary to Capitol Hill to make a laughable offer to Republicans on the fiscal cliff — literally. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reported that he burst out laughing upon hearing Tim Geithner spell out the White House’s terms.
Stage Two is watching Republicans squirm and panic. Less than a week after the hilarity courtesy of Geithner, the New York Times headlined a front-page piece, “GOP Looks for Fallback to Avoid a Fiscal Standoff.”
The grand budget deal that all the talking heads say we need to prove that Washington is still functional, to vindicate the memory of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, etc., etc., is almost certainly not going to come off.
For a deal to happen, one of two things must be true: The White House must either want a deal, or feel that it needs a deal. You don’t have to be a hostage negotiator or a game theorist to understand that neither is the case.
Does the White House need a deal? It considers its position so strong that it probably thinks it did McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner a favor by having Geithner show up to insult them in person. He could have done it by text message.
Obama just won an election in which pretty much his only concrete agenda item was a tax increase on the rich, although the casual listener might have thought he was talking only about taxing millionaires and billionaires. Tax increases on the rich poll well, while the Republican counter demands — entitlement cuts — don’t.
If nothing happens, tax increases go up for everyone, and all the polls show that the public is primed to blame the Republicans. That means that the president and the media will be plowing fertile ground when they paint Boehner and company as hideous extremists who hate the middle class if all rates go up at the end of the year.
So if the White House doesn’t need a deal, why would it want one? Because it is secretly spoiling to cut entitlement spending? Because Obama wakes up every morning wondering how he can cut the deficit today? Because weeks after sweeping to reelection, he is brimming over with modesty?
Obama loves to praise himself in public for his alleged courage in private discussing possible entitlement changes with Boehner during the fight over the debt ceiling. But he never says specifically what these changes were, let alone makes the case for them. He is always in favor of tough choices — in theory.
It has been rich to hear Democrats say that Republicans have to go first on entitlements, when House Republicans have passed the Paul Ryan budget twice. The president has the unique power to support any serious entitlement reform and instantly make it a matter of bipartisan consensus, because Republicans will endorse it and Democrats will grumble and go along. All the evidence is that he simply has no interest.
The Republican budget wonk and blogger Keith Hennessey carefully analyzed the numbers in the Geithner offer and figured, between the phantom savings and the new spending, it is a net spending increase. The new “balanced approach” is more taxes coupled with more spending.
The president is in a particular fever to raise tax rates, so that the Republican counteroffer of $800 billion in revenue through tightening up the tax code is dismissed out of hand. Why would the president want to increase any tax rates when the economy is still weak, and when he is said to be interested in pursuing tax reform next year that will presumably cut them right back down again?
It doesn’t make sense as economics or policy. It does as the triumphant finale of Operation Humiliation.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
The media is in full force obamagasm. Every headline is “This is the best” when it come to him and “Republicans humiliated again” when it comes to anybody that dares oppose him. Goebbels would be proud.
To: KoRnI think he’s after one more thing besides what you have explained. He wants the Republicans to bow down and kiss his ring in humiliation. He wants more than the power of an unlimited purse he wants their tacit, albeit unspoken, submission to his will. After they cave in on this ‘fiscal cliff’ BS I think we are going to see some amazing things happen.
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Slam dunk.
Because he wants to destroy this country, to turn it into a third-world socialist hellhole.
He was raised from his mother's knee to hate freedom and Western Civilazation in general, and the US in particular.
If you keep that in mind, everything he does makes perfect sense.
You are spot on. I am amazed of the fact that some people to this day “wonder” why BO does what he does. Everything he does is the bring our country down, plain and simple.
29% of old school “Republicans” agree with Obama - tax the rich.
70% of conservatives wish they could hold the gun Obama will use to put a cap in the Republican Congress.
64% of American (I mean, Omexican) voters prefer a contest about puppets, gay marriage, free contraception and, of course, skin color.
Educated, parent-raised, Christian votes have been replaced by low information, ghetto pride, gangster, pastime votes.
It’s not a fiscal cliff, it’s a cockroach colony that has reached maximum density and about to burst the foundations.
This nation is exceedingly corrupt, and it will not rouse itself until the blood flows.
Why would Obama need a budget deal, he has never had a budget!
Good God, if we just had someone to stand toe-to-toe with that marxist bastard and tell him it’s ALL tax cuts or NOTHING.
So effing what if tax hikes on the rich are “popular?” So were pet rocks. Tell that marxist and his supporters to shove his tax hike up their asses.
He said so.
I told someone that once, and they replied “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard”.
I then said “You’re right - that’s crazy. Do you have a better explanation for his behavior?”.
They didn’t.
What is the riddle of steel?
Just what are some of the “amazing things” you think we’re going to see happen?
Dinesh D’Souza is absolutely right about 0bamugabe. He’s a neo-colonialist having adopted the views of the bio-father he never knew.
I don’t have anything specific in mind. I just think he will overreach his Constitutional authority in ways that make his first term look timid. First he has to cow the Pubbies and publically humiliate them so that they can be ridiculed for any resistance they show later. The MSM will dogpile on them and carry the water that conservatism has been utterly invalidated.
It’s good to be king.
“Good God, if we just had someone to stand toe-to-toe with that marxist bastard and tell him it’s ALL tax cuts or NOTHING.”
So true. Romney the Nice Guy was steamrolled. Boehner is overmatched. We have no leader who holds a candle to these thugs. No superman to take on the bully, and this country seems to like bullies.
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