[UPDATE: Mother Jones writer says no need to watch… see below]
House Republicans are deserting the Obama jobs speech scheduled for Thursday evening. They simply won’t attend. Speaker John Boehner, who stuffed the President on his blatant attempt to summon Congress to sit before him, has now decided that the flimsy $300 billion half-hearted jobs speech is not worth rebutting. An increasing number of NBC affiliates won’t even show the speech itself, opting instead to stick with their regularly scheduled Saints-Packers pre-game show. It’s a sham, and they know it. Obama knows it, and he thinks that we are too dumb. He wants to use the Congress as a political prop, and some in Congress aren’t having any of it.
[Update] Even this writer for Mother Jones knows the speech is likely pointless speechifying, and this guy supports Obama!
He proclaimed there was “an urgent need to accelerate job growth in the short term.” And he proposed job-creating initiatives that would cost up to $200 billion and called on Congress to enact these measures quickly.
That president was Barack Obama—back in December 2009, when his economic advisers feared that the recovery, which had been boosted by the stimulus package passed earlier in the year, was weakening. After months of wrangling in the White House, Obama and his aides had finally concluded that another shot of stimulus—though they didn’t call it that—was necessary. So that month, Obama delivered a big speech at the Brookings Institution and proclaimed the need for a series of new initiatives. But what came next? Basically, not much.
— David Corn in Mother Jones: You Don’t Have to Watch Obama’s Big Jobs Speech: It’s what he does afterward that matters.
[pullquote]bits and pieces of his plan[/pullquote]There will be nothing new in the speech, nothing big, and nothing that works. What’s more, the President himself has said that the speech on Thursday evening won’t even be the whole plan. That’s right, he’s going to release bits and pieces of his plan, as if nothing depended on it even if it were a good idea, throughout the autumn. Perhaps in winter too. If this were a serous effort at a jobs plan, wouldn’t each day matter? This is a transparent manipulation by a clumsy and bungling campaign team who see nothing other than the re-election of the President as worth working for. Good thing they’re incompetent.
There will be a glorious, spectacular exchange of views, but it will be over the weekend, and it will most assuredly come at the expense of the President. There goes Obama, in the 44 jersey, fumbling his own hail Mary play, running back, back, back, to catch the hike to himself in a forward lateral run-back interception fake blitz…yawn! Fourth and 60.
So House Republicans, please take the day off. I sincerely hope you all have some chips and beer, or cigars and whiskey, getting warmed up for the football game that constitutes a truly effective limit on the President’s power. He withers without his beloved camera, and it is being removed from him no matter what at 8:30 PM Eastern 5:30 Pacific. Check your local affiliate for details. Muaahaahaaa.
