Pres. Obama: Being a Grown-Up is Not Enough

We’ve all seen them, been annoyed by them.  Those revolting children in the store or restaurant or anywhere you happen to be, throwing a temper tantrum and screaming at the top of their lungs because they want something and they can’t have it.  But as much as we’ve loathed those children in the darkest places of our hearts, we’re all of us essentially kind people and few of us have ever wished ill on the children themselves.  I mean . . . they’re children for God’s sake.  They don’t really know what they’re doing because they’ve obviously never been taught how to behave properly.

No, in those circumstances I think most of us save our private ill-wishing for the parents of the brat causing such a ruckus, who are demonstrably incapable of controlling their little Hellspawn and who are almost certainly responsible for the kid’s willingness to behave so atrociously in the first place.

President Obama might want to consider this as he continues his quest to be seen as “the only grown-up in the room.”  ‘Cause it seems to be backfiring on him.

This is Getting Really Crazy

First, the House Republicans insisted on voting on their insane "Cut, Cap and Balance" plan for cutting the deficit, despite the fact they knew it was DOA in the Senate. But they went through this little vanity act anyway, wasting time, and then -- as was expected -- the Senate killed the beast last Friday by voting to table it.

Then John Boehner and Harry Reid announced they were working on their own, competing deficit reduction bills. Reid's bill gives the Republicans everything they've asked for: $2.7 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, with absolutely no revenue increases. However, Reid's plan (i) cuts costs by closing out the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and (ii) does not cut Medicare or Social Security spending. Since the GOP doesn't believe a spending cut is really a spending cut unless it hurts old, poor or sick people, the Republicans already have announced their opposition to Reid's plan.

And then there is John Boehner's "two-step proposal," which is supposed raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion (which will carry us through about 6 months) and slash entitlement spending for the old, poor and sick people the GOP considers such lazy parasites. Afterward, Boehner anticipates we go through this entire hostage-taking exercise again six months from now by having another round of debt-limit wrangling while the Republicans look for more safety net programs they can slash.

But Obama has announced an intention to veto Boehner's plan if it gets to him, which it won't because Reid has announced it won't pass the Senate, which is moot because Republican leaders themselves acknowledge that Boehner doesn't have enough votes to get his bill past the House either.

In light of all this, Reid indicated earlier today that he was going to wait to watch Boehner's proposal get shot down in the House before presenting his own bill in the Senate. I suppose the thinking was that - by then - we'd be so close to the Aug. 2nd drop-dead date that Reid's plan would be the only way to avoid defaulting on our debt, and that enough sane Republicans could be found in the House to get his plan passed and onto President Obama's desk before Defaultageddon.

But then the Congressional Budget Office announced that Boehner's plan doesn't actually save very much money. So then Boehner said that he is re-writing his proposal (and scrambling to try to get some more support from his own party) and is delaying a vote on his plan until Thursday. Oh, yeah . . . and get this: Boehner also has scheduled another vote on Thursday to have a balanced budget amendment added to the Constition. That's right. Apparently, for the GOP, 5 days before the United States defaults on its debt obligations is the perfect time to have a vote about amending the frigging Constitution.

There is no word yet if Harry Reid still intends to wait for Boehner's bill to be shot down before bringing his own proposal before the Senate, but it seems clear that while the House Republicans are dicking around with balanced budget amendments and bills that can't even get past the chamber that they themselves control time is getting very, very short.

Here's a proposal: Why doesn't Congress just raise the debt ceiling, without worrying right now about slashing the deficit, exactly the way it has 89 times before? Seriously, this wholly manufactured "debt ceiling crisis" could be resolved in 30 seconds with a coupla voice votes, and then Congress could go back to arguing about the deficit -- without the Sword of Damocles hanging over its head -- while it tried to work out the 2012 budget.

Simple, no?

GOP: Gang Of (adolescent) Punks

Back in my college days I read a line by P.J. O'Rourke that stuck with me ever since. P.J. was explaining the allure of being a 3rd World freedom fighter and observed (paraphrasing from memory): "It will always be more fun to run around in the mountains with a Kalashnikov and sleep with ideology-addled college girls than it will be to spend your life in a rice paddy staring at the ass-end of a water buffalo." Of course, what is implied but not stated is that "staring at the ass-end of a water buffalo" is what actually keeps people from starving to death.

Generally speaking, it is the sober, plodding work that people do that produces more overall benefit, and does so more reliably and routinely, than does the rousing, romantic, exciting confrontation that we all tend to find so viscerally appealing. This is why - in the Real World - most people end up in jobs that do not provide much in the way of excitement but do pay better than any reasonable alternative: boring, routine work produces the most benefit to society. This is also why they don't make movies that are only about people doing boring, routine work: we may all of us be stuck doing that sort of stuff, but we don't enjoy it much and our dreams are always of things a lot more fun.

One of the marks of being an adult is recognizing a univeral truth: if you really want to accomplish something worthwhile, doing so will involve a great deal of hard, mostly boring work. On the other hand, if you care more about "striking a blow" or "making a statement" for whatever cause you've decided to make your own, then you are still pretty much an adolescent who really just wants to star in a movie.

Sometimes it seems to me that America is becoming more and more a nation of adolescents. Even scarier, there seems to be an increasing likelihood that these adolescents have actually seized control of the country.

America Has Defaulted Before. Sort of.

Norm Ornstein has a new article up at Foreign Policy titled: "Worst. Congress. Ever." (H/t, again, to Steve Benen at Washington Monthly) In it, Ornstein reviews how the GOP's extreme partisan ideology has hamstrung the 112th Congress so as to prevent even the simplest and most necessary acts from being accomplished:

[L]ook what we have now: a long-term debt disaster with viable bipartisan solutions on the table but ignored or cast aside in Congress; an impasse of the usually perfunctory matter of raising the statutory debt limit placing the United States in jeopardy of its first ever default . . . (emphasis added).

You see statements like this again and again when reading articles about the debt ceiling: that if the debt ceiling isn't raised the United States will default on its debt obligations for "the first time ever." Except that statement isn't really true. In fact, our country pretty much began by defaulting on its debts.

Eric Cantor: My Negotiating Guru

House Leader Eric Cantor has an, ah, unique negotiating style. Apparently, during a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, Cantor suggested that there was nothing stopping everyone involved in the debt limit negotiations from reaching a deal immediately. Cantor pointed out that the GOP had asked for entitlement cuts and that the White House had agreed to some entitlement cuts in exchange for additional increases in revenue. The only sticking point was that the GOP didn't want to give Obama any increases in revenue. Nevertheless:

"We both agree on doing something that is good for the country, which is dealing with entitlements," Cantor said, "Why don't we just do that? Why do we have to sit here and say we still got to raise taxes when we don't agree on that? We both agree on entitlements, and, in fact, we would both agree on what the president's prescription for entitlement reform is."

That's brilliant! I can't wait to pull that the next time I get a new car: "Look, we both agree that you want me to have this car, and that I want me to have this car. Why do we have to sit here and say we still got to agree that I need to pay you money for it? Why don't we just go with what we both agree on: I get the car. We can do this deal right now."

I'm sure that'll go over about as well as did this silliness with the President.

Gaming Out the Debt Limit Negotiations

(Because Estabon Ferlingetti VI demanded it)

For a lot of different reasons, it is obviously insane that the House GOP has resorted to extortion by threatening to block an increase in the nation’s debt limit unless its demands for spending cuts are met.  Every person who actually understands the situation agrees that the economic consequences would be disastrous should America end up defaulting on its public debts.  Toby Ziegler explains:

This is why even John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have acknowledged that the nation’s debt limit must be raised before the August 2^nd drop-dead date.  “Must” – not “should.” Toby Ziegler's assessment of what will occur should the United States default of its debt obligations may have been dramatic, but it wasn't far off the mark. <:p>