All the hurt you thought was gone has now returned,
And every thing she's laughing at is all you learned.
And you let go, let go, let go, 'cause you know you're getting tired....Can you feel it getting down to the wire? - Neil Young, 'Down To The Wire'
The last minute deal to avoid a government shutdown has been completed, and GOP Speaker John Boehner is being touted as a winner in the budget battle in Washington.
He indeed won, but it's worth looking at what the Republicans actually accomplished...and where they fell short.
The $38.5 billion in spending cuts is far below the $61 billion the Republicans originally wanted, but remember that Speaker Boehner initially only proposed $32 billion in spending cuts...and President Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid originally wanted no cuts at all, but grudgingly agreed to go along with a mere $4.7 billion in cuts. The end result is $33.8 billion more in spending cuts than Reid and President Obama wanted.
The cuts that were made are more significant than the numbers indicate, because they actually kill programs instead of just lowering their budgets. This means that those numbers will expand over the coming year.And even more importantly the cuts establish a benchmark and create momentum for the real battle to come, the 2012 budget.
President Obama, of course, is taking credit for the spending cuts even though he was out of Washington on yet another vacay. And in a bass akwards way, he's actually correct this time. It was Obama's abysmally stupid move of promising to veto a bill the House passed to guarantee military salaries in the event of a shut down that guaranteed that the Democrats would take more flak than the GOP in the event of a shutdown, and likely gave Boehner and the Republicans the stick they needed to get Harry Reid to cave in. The ploy of holding the troops' paychecks hostage is going to rank as one of Obama's dumbest moves ever, and that is saying something for this president.
And now, since we've looked at the good, let's look at the bad and the ugly.
The GOP promised the Tea Party $100 billion in spending cuts, and were rewarded with a majority in the House and a number of Senate seats. They failed to deliver, and in spite of all the spin about this 'victory', that hasn't gone unnoticed.
The $38.5 billion in spending cuts sounds impressive, but nowhere near what's going to be necessary to dig us out of the hole Obama and his Democrat enablers have put us in. As a yardstick, during the eight days it took to negotiate this compromise, the national debt grew by $54 billion.
If the Republicans are unwilling to do what they were sent to Washington to do, they will not be trusted again by the party's base,which is in no mood for business as usual. The GOP damaged itself here, and they had best realize it and change accordingly.
And speaking of business as usual, remember those riders on defunding Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting and ObamaCare? Remember how we were promised that those were written in stone?
All of them were removed from the budget bill. NPR will be funded as usual, and the funding for both Planned Parenthood and ObamaCare will go to the Senate floor for a vote...where they will likely be easily defeated, even if a few Red State Democrats up for re-election cross party lines.
The real ugly in all this, as far as I'm concerned, was the failure of the Republican leadership to respond effectively to the Democrat's hysteria about 'a war on women' by revealing exactly why the Democrats stood in lockstep to protect NPR and Planned Parenthood's tax payer funding.
And it had nothing to do with 'reproductive rights'. That was simply yahoo drivel to gin up the base. No one even suggested outlawing abortion on demand, but by trying to take the taxpayers off the hook for it, the GOP literally put up a Cross in front of a vampire.
Planned Parenthood, like the public employee unions is an example of how the Democrats operate and how we got into the fix we're in.
Here's how the scam works. The Democrats fund Planned Parenthood (which is essentially an abortion mill) with taxpayer dollars, which they get from everyone, no matter what their political affiliation or their views on the morality of abortion on demand. In exchange for this largess, Planned Parenthood then kicks back a million or so back to the Democrats to get them elected,and provides the bodies to man the phone banks, walk the precincts, be part of rent-a-mobs when required, and chat up the media.
NPR operates exactly the same way. The Democrats use taxpayer dollars to fund what amounts to a partisan propaganda outlet to broadcast their agenda..and again, a not inconsiderable amount of those taxpayer dollars are kicked back to the Democrat's coffers.
It's a parasitical masterpiece that would make the average flea or tick weep with greed and envy...if they could weep.
Now, I may have missed it, but I never heard one prominent Republican make this argument to the American people.Had that happened, the Democrats still would have fought for NPR and Planned parenthood tooth and nail, but an important part of their narrative would be revealed for the cynical, self-serving sham that it actually is
To win the all-important battle of public opinion, these are the sort of points that need to be made over and over again. Especially as the battle against the Leftist agenda intensifies and goes down to the wire with November 2012 approaching.
Like military victories, real political victories are never won by half measures.
Boehner needs to go in 2012.
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