Republican Politics

Republicans On Republicans

November 29, 2010 By mario piperni

The left has debated and criticized Republican obstructionism for the last two years…all to no avail. So it always gives me a bit of hope (and pleasure) when conservatives of note venture out into the Forbidden land and knock their own party on their destructive and partisan ways.

David Stockman, one of Ronald Reagan’s economic gurus, on CNN yesterday.

– We need “a higher tax burden on the upper income.”

– “After 1985, the Republican Party adopted the idea that tax cuts can solve the whole problem, and that therefore in the future, deficits didn’t matter and tax cuts would be the solution of first, second, and third resort.”

– The 2001 Bush tax cut “was totally not needed.”

– On claims that Reagan proved tax cuts lead to higher government revenues: “Reagan proved nothing of the kind and yet that became the mantra and it just led the Republican Party away from its traditional sound money, fiscal restraint.”

– Former Vice President Cheney “should have known better” than claim the Bush tax cuts would pay for themselves.

– “I’ll never forgive the Bush administration and Paulson for basically destroying the last vestige of fiscal responsibility that we had in the Republican Party. After that, I don’t know how we ever make the tough choices.”

Stockman might not forgive Bush but the rest of his party surely has. If anything, they’re still calling for the exact same economic policies which led to the collapse.

Then there’s the START nuclear arms control treaty. Republicans, led by Sen. John Kyl, are blocking its ratification. Dick Lugar, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a loyal Republican and has fought against both the stimulus bill and health care reform. On this issue though, he’s somehow found the courage to confront his fellow Republicans.

“Please do your duty for your country. We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture right now. We’re not going to have it until we sign the START treaty. We’re not going to be able to get rid of further missiles and warheads aimed at us. I state it candidly to my colleagues, one of those warheads…could demolish my city of Indianapolis — obliterate it! Now Americans may have forgotten that. I’ve not forgotten it and I think that most people who are concentrating on the START treaty want to move ahead to move down the ladder of the number of weapons aimed at us.”

And then there is Brent Scowcroft who is willing to call out the GOP for putting party before country.

“It’s not clear to me what it is,” said Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush who noted that this START treaty is not very different from previous ones negotiated and ratified under Republican presidents. “I’ve got to think that it’s the increasingly partisan nature and the desire for the president not to have a foreign policy victory.”

Yep. It really is that simple. Analyze it all you want but it always comes back to the single goal Republicans have had since January 2008 – whatever Obama proposes, regardless of its value to the nation, stop it. As for Lugar and Scowcroft, they’ll be ripped apart by conservative hacks for daring to stray away from The Plan. After all, with only two years to go before the next general election, this is no time to make truth and integrity a part of Republican politics.

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click on ‘Like’ here

nuclear arms control treaty.

Filed Under: Republican Politics Tagged With: economics, political issues, Republicans, START

Coleman Advises Joe Miller To Give It Up

November 24, 2010 By mario piperni

This is funny.

Even Norm Coleman thinks it’s time for Joe Miller to give up his Alaska Senate fight. “I think that race is over,” Coleman said in an interview that will air this Sunday on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers. “I think the counting’s been done I’m not sure there’s anything that would change that.”

“It should be time to move on,” he said. “There’s not much that you can gain by extending the process.”

Yes, that’s the same Norm Coleman who dragged out his Senate race with Al Franken for eight months and brought it all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. This was after a bipartisan state canvassing board had declared Franken the victor two months after the election.

It does not appear Miller has any intention of following Coleman’s advice. On Monday he filed suit in Fairbanks Superior Court asking them to disallow any write-in ballots showing a faulty spelling of Murkowskee’s Merkowski’s Murkowski’s name. Obviously, voter intent has little meaning for teabaggers.

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click on ‘Like’ here
.

Filed Under: Republican Politics Tagged With: alaska, coleman, miller, minnesotta, political issues, Republicans

President Obama As Wiley E. Coyote

November 18, 2010 By mario piperni

Yesterday I had a piece on Democrats’ cowardly ways. Greg Sargent adds more.

One last nugget from Richard Wolffe’s new book on the Obama White House. In an interview with Wolffe, the President seemed to acknowledge that in pursuing bipartisan support for health reform, he and Democrats got snookered by a previously-thought-out GOP strategy to delay the process for as long as possible in order to politically damage him and the Democratic Party.

Here’s the President on page 75:

“You have to give the Republicans credit, just from a pure political perspective, that they used every instrument available to them in the Senate to prolong the process in such a way that helped drive down support nationally, that gave everybody a sense that somehow Washington was broken,” he told me. “At a time when everybody was worrying about jobs, for us to have to spend six to nine months on this piece of legislation obviously was not helpful.”

Ok, wonderful. He supposedly gets it. Now what? Each time Dems give in to Republican demands, the goal posts get shifted further to the right. What is it going to take for the President to realize that the only end zone that matters for Republicans is the one that has them occupying the Oval Office in 2012?

Sargent is absolutely right in stating that there was no reason for the health care debate to drag on for as long as it did. It was quite evident within the first month or so that Republicans had no desire to reach agreement on any part of reform. By allowing Republicans to define the issues along their terms, Democrats saw public opinion on reform shift dramatically away from what it was at the beginning of 2009. And so it has been with every other issue Democrats have attempted to deal with in Congress.

How many more times does the anvil need to fall squarely on their heads before the President and Democrats really do indeed get it? It might be time to replace the Democratic donkey with a pic of a clueless Wiley E. Coyote.

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click on ‘Like’ here
.

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Republican Politics Tagged With: boxing, health care, Obama, political issues, Republican Politics

Republican Politics: Part II

November 4, 2010 By mario piperni

Need more convincing on what the GOP plan for the next two years is all about?

At a Heritage Foundation speech later this morning, McConnell will reiterate his desire to see Obama unseated in 2012, and will pull back the veil on the next two years, which are poised to be mired in political theatrics and policy gridlock.

“Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” McConnell will say. “But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things.”

“On health care that means we can – and should – propose and vote on straight repeal, repeatedly,” McConnell will add. “But we can’t expect the president to sign it. So we’ll also have to work, in the House, on denying funds for implementation, and, in the Senate, on votes against its most egregious provisions.”

And yet the President speaks of compromise across the board. In GOP doublespeak, compromising means doing it their way…and even then the likelihood is that you’ll fail because they’ll reject that too. But even if President Obama did decide to play hardball, he’d need the cooperation of Dems in Congress. When members of his own party are running away from legislation they voted on a few short months ago, trying to convince the masses that you did the right thing becomes a near impossible task.

One of the more positive outcomes from Tuesday’s election was the fact that of the 60 or so Dems who lost their seats, 29 were Blue Dogs. Good riddance.

Help spread the word by becoming a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s Facebook page. Click on ‘Like’ here

Filed Under: Republican Politics Tagged With: blud dogs, mcconell, political issues, Republicans

In Case You Still Don’t Understand What Happened November 2

November 4, 2010 By mario piperni

David Broder gets this first part right.

What happened was that Obama ran into several crises that he and others had not anticipated, and the cumulative weight of those problems ended up frustrating him.

The biggest problem by far was the economy, the virtual collapse of the financial system starting in the autumn of 2008 while George W. Bush was still president. That eased Obama’s path to the presidency but it saddled him with a huge and lingering burden once he was in office.

He was also burdened by the legacy of two wars and a backlog of unmet domestic needs, ranging from a dysfunctional health-care system to undernourished infrastructure and energy sectors.

This part not so much.

Somewhere along the way, Obama lost sight of his campaign pledge to enlist Republican ideas and votes. Maybe they were never there to be had, but he never truly tested it. And the deeper he became enmeshed in the Democratic politics of Capitol Hill, the less incentive there was for any Republican to contribute to his success.

“Never truly tested it”? Please. If Obama has done anything wrong, it has been pursuing bipartisanship long after it became clear that Republicans had no intent of doing anything other than gum up the works. If the President failed, they won. End of story. In the world view of Republicans, winning always takes precedence over everything and that includes the economic, emotional and intellectual well being of Americans.

Here’s a piece from the NYT written last March which explains the obstructionist plan laid out by Mitch McConnell and his gang of thugs.

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.

Mr. McConnell, 68, a Kentuckian more at home plotting tactics in the cloakroom than writing legislation in a committee room or exhorting crowds on the campaign trail, has come to embody a kind of oppositional politics that critics say has left voters cynical about Washington, the Senate all but dysfunctional and the Republican Party without a positive agenda or message.But in the short run at least, his approach has worked. For more than a year, he pleaded and cajoled to keep his caucus in line. He deployed poll data. He warned against the lure of the short-term attention to be gained by going bipartisan, and linked Republican gains in November to showing voters they could hold the line against big government.

In McConnell’s own words:

“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.”

“It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.”

And if you need a visual for what you just read, here it is. Twenty-one months captured in a single illustration.