Maybe the Democrats should have treated W the same way. Iraq was the single worst foreign policy decision in a generation. Maybe the Democrats should have treated W like a pawn of the oil industry and gone public with that and fought tooth and nail against an invasion of Iraq. That would have been the GOP strategy if they were aligned against W. They could have called Dick Cheney a bad rerun from the Nixon administration and just hammered that point over and over again until Cheney couldn't do anything but defend himself because he had become the whole issue. Scorched earth warfare is very effective if you're willing to live in smoldering ruins afterwards.
Beat me to it. These people just do not live in a fact-based world. For example, the sequestration effort has been hampering economic recovery, and is CLEARLY not what the administration or the Dems in Congress want. It even is hampering military preparedness. Yet some here claim that the administration is getting EVERYTHING it wants. Heh! See what I mean about crybabies...
I think economics are at the core of the current dysfunction, and the irony is that Boehner was part of the reason why, only to get destroyed by the processes and political positions he set in motion. Remember that as the Financial Crisis was accelerating, it was the Bush Administration that fashioned the Keynsian response of TARP, taking over AIG and setting the stage to save the auto industry. Some GOP members even noted there was a national defense issue involed in the later effort. Then the House initially voted against that on ideological grounds, and the stock market nearly went down the toilet. So the House reversed themselves, and TARP was passed. THat might have been the end of the craziness, but then Obama was elected. Now his admin took over administration of TARP, and Boehner was back to saying that austerity was the proper economic response. No reputable economist believes that you cut government spending when the economy is in free fall. Yet that is what Boehner and the GOP were proposing. This was something new, and directly opposite to what the Bush Administration had been doing. Why? I think they were concerned that if Obama succeeded too well at improving the economy, the GOP would go into permanent minority status. Instead they determined to oppose Obama at every stage, and the resulting economic stimulus package was a too small compromise when they needed 3 GOP moderate senators to get it passed. The fear among GOP leaders was they knew Bush was already unpopular for Iraq, and for the optics of Katrina, atempting to privatize Social Security, deregulation that led to the Financial Crisis. They instead as a tactical matter chose to change the subject by fighting Obama at every step, and to my mind Obama was not adept enough at seeing what they were up to. Right wingers wanted to talk about Obama not being a Christian, not born in the US, rather than wonder why the economy would fail after 8 yeras of GOP stewardship. Change the subject, and if things stayed bad beacuse of their obstruction, blame it on Obama. Luckily the economy improved enough that Obama was reelected. Still the GOP has gotten majorities in Congress, so we have the current mess. Slash and burn is all they have, but that seems to be enough for their ill informed and angry base.
We should remember that the initial TARP vote down was not just a Conservative effort. Representatives voted against it from all different parts of the political spectrum. It was characterized as a masked robbery by some on the left and welfare for millionaires and billionaires. It was characterized as a giveaway to Goldman Sachs and the VC's who had nearly lost their shirts in the debt crisis. Conservatives voted against it also, but that was a Democratic Congress that said no on the first vote. Only two-thirds of the Democrats joined a third of the Republicans in support and the bill was defeated 228 to 205.
The objections you refer to were to the particulars of the bill, not the overall concept that the government needed to step in at the time to prevent the death spiral of the markets from proceeding. Boehner was opposed to the very concept of Keynsianism, and so have the GOP leadership been ever since.
I should also point out I am not sure how "only" two-thirds of Dems supporting a GOP president's bill means that the vote against was not primarily a conservative effort.
When my tax dollars are going to PlannedMurder so they can murder more babies and then sell their body parts, then yes, it should be shut down.
The video is all the proof I need. Too bad dumbasses like you and Dierking will never admit it. Sad how you guys support the murder of babies. Takes a special kind of psychopath to support that.
The Democratic establishment, the Clinton wing of the party, was fully behind the bill and pushing hard for it. Presidential nominee Barack Obama was pushing hard for the bill. Basically the entire center of the political spectrum was pushing hard for the bill, which was a stabilizing bill, and both ends of the political spectrum were opposed - sometimes for the same reasons.
Well I'm glad that you and Ted Cruz aren't ever going to be a judge on any of my trials. I guess they're too busy investigating Hillary,.
The middle class has become a monotonous Dem talking point. People like Debbie W. Schultz all they say when they're interviewed is 'middle class" a million times. Because they are afraid to talk about the poor. And that brings up entitlements. A very unpopular subject.
Define the middle class. If you mean people making upwards of $200k a year, then yes the GOP is helping those people. If you mean people making under $75k a year then yes, the Democrats are helping those people. If you mean everybody in between, no probably not, nobody is particularly responsive to the 13% of the US population that falls in that range. 85% of US households are making less then $75k a year. Another 13% are making between $75k and $200k a year. 2% are making upwards of $200K. So if middle class means the person in the middle then you're talking about $41K a year. And yes, the Democrats are definitely helping that group of people out as much as they can. If middle class means the 13% who are doing well but not rich, no nobody is helping those people out. If middle class means the top 2%, well that's Republican territory.
