Robert Reich, spot on as usual:
The President continues to legitimize the Republican claim that too much government spending caused the economy to tank, and that by cutting back spending we’ll get the economy going again.
Every time a Democrat gives a Republican thug an inch, it legitimizes all Republican thuggery. It becomes writ in stone. When you compromise with a Right Winger, or capitulate to the Right Wing machine, you have endorsed their policies for good and all. Year after year, the ideals once held as sacred to liberal and progressive voters, the backbone of the Democratic Party, have been devalued by it's own leadership through one-sided compromise and bald faced sell outs.
The right-wing bullies are emboldened. They will hold the nation hostage again and again.
In a few weeks the debt ceiling has to be raised. After that, next year’s budget has to be decided on. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan has already put forward proposals to turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private insurance companies, turn Medicaid and Food Stamps into block grants that give states discretion to shift them to the non-poor, and give even more big tax cuts to the rich.
There will also be Republican votes to de-fund the new health care law.
“Americans of different beliefs came together,” he announced late last night. It was the “largest spending cut in our history.” He sounded triumphant. In fact, he’s encouraging the bullies onward.
All the while, he and the Democratic leadership in Congress refuse to refute the Republicans’ big lie — that spending cuts will lead to more jobs. In fact, spending cuts now will lead to fewer jobs. They’ll slow down an already-anemic recovery. That will cause immense and unnecessary suffering for millions of Americans.
The President continues to legitimize the Republican claim that too much government spending caused the economy to tank, and that by cutting back spending we’ll get the economy going again.
We watch as our elected representatives give away our jobs, shred our education system, our pathetic safety net, defund and disempower our institutions for environmental protection, workplace safety, food safety, economic justice. Whatever the Right Wing wants to destroy, they know they only have to run the economy into the ground, run up a huge deficit through wars, tax give-aways to the rich, and criminal financial schemes and bingo, they get whatever they want from our own Democratic leaders with a snap of their fingers. Of course, the most precious thing they seek through their extortion is not the cuts, or the sabotaging of our economy, they get the main thing they are after: validation by the subjugated.
Endless compromise is political suicide. Our always narrow ( thanks to the aversion our leadership has for permanent party building efforts) margin of victory shrinks as we reach 'across the aisle"
Why would a new voter or a marginal voter come out to vote for a party that does not stand up for it's own?
http://robertreich.org/post/4467669419
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