Hugh Hewitt is not happy with the deal reportedly shaping up between “Congress” and the White House:
Sunday, July 31, 2011Automatic cuts to Defense are tantamount to threatening the national security. If Democrats were simply obstinate and ran the clock down, they would put Republicans in the position of choosing between tax hikes and destructive cuts to defense spending.
via HughHewitt.com Blog : Hugh Hewitt : Preparing to Defend Defense.
Please don’t look surprised. You chose this outcome when you prioritized short-term market fluctuations, which you admitted were not rational, over the long-term effects:
Friday, July 29, 2011To pass Boehner 2.0 is just to move to the next phase of the debate. To kill it now is to dance on the edge of a financial meltdown. There is no reason for default even if the debt ceiling is raised, but markets aren’t rational in the short term, and in this particular short-term with a president as inexperienced and incompetent as this one, the fears could easily overpower the facts.
Please pardon my anger in this. I have an enormous respect for Hugh, even when I disagree with him, which has been common for the last year, except during the Pledge sellout and CR debacle, where he seemed to have had enough of the Lucy-and-the-football treatment he’s always warning us about. Well, this time, he took a great big run at it, and really kicked as hard as he could. He convinced himself that President Lucy had said many untrue things in the past, but simply had the virtue of being correct about August second being a quite inauspicious date for liberty.
He is in good company in this: The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and Ambassador John Bolton all came to the same conclusion. The problem is that they took their eye off the real threat–that the Democrats were lying on the build-up, were lying during negotiations, are lying as it comes to a head, and will lie in the interpretation, explanation, and implementation of every single scrap of paper they can produce or destroy, modify or block.
[pullquote]If the GOP has become a death cult, we have no desire to join them.[/pullquote]
The Tea Party rescued a moribund GOP from the heat death envisioned by no less than Senator Mitch McConnell as he lamented that we had become a regional party, fated only to carp about insufficiently thrifty school boards and so forth. The GOP’s own leadership cast the party upon the ashheap of history, and having been snatched from it by the Tea Party, now apparently pine for the fading warmth of the ashheap. If the GOP has become a death cult, we have no desire to join them.
Mitch McConnell has become the Jim Jones of our party, and John Boehner is his Kool-Aid schlepping monkey. The Tea Party says to the GOP Join Us or Be Destroyed. That’s not a threat–we’re rescuing you again, if possible. If not, well, the Tea Party will not perish with the GOP. If we cannot save this party from itself and its mortal enemy, then we will simply take it over or die trying. They leave us no alternative. We sent them an awesome weapon in the last election, and they are breaking it into pieces because they’re afraid of it. They refuse to even fire it.
[pullquote]Old Democrats know how to wield power, whereas old Republicans know how to avoid responsibility.[/pullquote]
People like Hugh Hewitt have, presumably in good faith, placed an unwarranted faith in the GOP’s ability to somehow not get completely screwed by the old bull Democrats, who are frankly better at all of this than the old Republicans. The Republicans and Democrats have a shared history of utter dominance in Congress by Democrats. Old Democrats know how to wield power, whereas old Republicans know how to avoid responsibility. Those are the survival skills that have evolved in different conditions. Our old Republicans are inadequate to the task of defeating old Democrats, and so both must go. Like the thermostatic choke on a Series II Jaguar XJ6, the old Republicans “do not function properly, and cannot be made to function properly.”
It doesn’t matter whether or not the stock market dips now or doesn’t. Not in the way that it matters whether or not we can get meaningful debt reduction, which will never happen if we continue to let them stampede us into ill-advised action on shaky, unproveable pretenses. Assuming the GOP didn’t actually want this to work out this way. After their shameful and dishonest performance on the budget/CR issue, I don’t put anything past them.
Hugh, you got this one wrong. Insert rueful Charlie Brown quote here.
If I weren’t so damned angry, I’d be dismayed. But I have no time for dismay. We have work to do.
