You sometimes wonder if the R’s can actually hear what they say. If they can...you really wonder if they believe all the words that come out of their mouths. And if they do...you have to wonder what color the sky is in Republican-land.
Or perhaps the R’s are suffering from a kind of group dementia. Because it would seem they can barely remember last week, never mind a year and a half ago.
For example, over the past several days, particularly since the sequester cuts took place on Friday, numerous Republican leaders have claimed over and over again that President Obama and Senate Democrats had put no plan on the table to solve the issue. The plain fact of the matter is that the President did make a proposal, that the Senate voted on it Friday...gaining a majority vote on it...only to see it fail in the end because of a Republican filibuster.
Are the R’s so demented they filibustered a plan that didn’t think existed? We fear they are.
If they can’t...or won’t...remember last week, we surely can’t expect them to remember all the way back to 2011. This is evident as, over the past several weeks, they’ve been blaming President Obama for the sequester’s existence at all. It was, after all, his proposal. Republicans would never come up with something so diabolical as automatic across-the-board budget cuts. It is true that the specifics of the plan did come from the White House. But they conveniently forget that most of them voted for it...including Paul Ryan who also gave a speech praising Congress’s work in passing it and Speaker Boehner who, in an interview, famously said that he got “98% of what I wanted” out of the deal, pronouncing himself “pretty happy”.
They also forget that the crisis which the sequester ended was one they caused themselves by refusing to raise the nation’s debt limit...thus, in the name of cutting spending, refusing to pay the bills for spending they’d already committed to...and something they threaten to do once again when it comes due again in May.
Nearly every economist, politician and ordinary citizen with any knowledge of the subject has pronounced the sequester budget cuts “stupid”, suggesting there are better ways to reduce the deficit than “taking a meat axe” to the budget. One can understand why the R’s would want to claim no responsibility for such an act...even when their fingerprints are all over it. But such is the color of the sky in Republican-land.
Or would we prefer to believe the R’s are simply pathological liars rather than demented deniers of reality?
Perhaps we would.
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