Sorry, bit of a rant coming on, I fear. I’m so mad at the GOP shenanigans that I can hardly see straight.
This “gang of six” deal is a butt-rocket. I could go on copying and pasting pros and cons and cons and cons, but the two facts I care about are this:
- It’s a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR tax increase by any honest math
- The plan “drew immediate praise from President Barack Obama.” (Wall Street Journal)
That’s enough for me. Okay, one more, from the same WSJ paragraph: “The plan would reduce the deficit by $3.7 trillion over 10 years.” Gee, can you spare it? That’s just the amount the Obama has added to the deficit SO FAR! By the end of this year it’ll be $5T on his watch, and God knows how much more by the time he’s done in 2012 if there is a God and He loves us, or in 2016 if there is a God and He hates us. NEVER MIND how much more Obama has already caused to be added through his ruinous Marxist death-panel CommieCare get-poor-quick scheme.
Unbelievable that Republicans would smilingly present a plan which even if it lived up to 1000% percent of its hype would only wipe out over ten years the “deficit” that Obama generated in two. And wait a minute–I just noticed that it says it will reduce the deficit by that amount over ten years. WinTheFuture? The deficit is year-by-year, not a sum over years. You cut a deficit IN ten years. You cut a DEBT over ten years. If they are aggregating deficits, that is debt. But wouldn’t they like us to think it’s deficit? Bastards.
I opposed the *pledge* for Cut Cap & Balance because it looked like a fig leaf for EXACTLY this sort of shenanigans. “Here, buy into yet another set of promises that (really do!) sound good, right before we sell you out once more…” I very much like Cut, Cap & Balance. I hate what is sure enough going on here–the GOP is using the fact that CCB just got a vote to trot out this syphilitic proposal to raise taxes and barely trim the stubble on deficits.
Our friends in the GOP may yet do the right thing. But the fact that the Gang of Six returned and trotted out their fricking Jamie Gorelick / Lee Hamilton (okay not really, but might as well be) proposal on the day that CCB went through, after we already told G6 to pack sand once–I find it unsettling. I think the GOP is once again trying to bamboozle not the left but the right. After all, they’re in secret talks with the left all God-Damned day these days, and we can hardly get the GOP to come on conservative media.
If this goes poorly, I will be done with the GOP. One year ago, I was an establishment man, leery of the Tea Party. Yet the Tea Party has consistently done the right thing, notably in not going third party even a little, and the GOP has consistently refused to act as if there are conservatives around. If forced to choose by a disappearance of common ground, I’ll be straight-up Tea Party.
Even if they go third party. Maybe. Damn I’m angry.
