While emos shriek, Obama gives Boehner the shiv

Liberal Librarian/The People's View

A bit of analysis from Josh Marshall:

 But the real issue here probably comes down to Boehner’s weakness, institutional and personal. It’s a question the White House has had from the beginning and suspects the worst on — that John Boehner can’t actually deliver any deal, almost no matter what’s included in it. Someone on Twitter just called him the rodeo clown of conservative politics, which about captures it.

We've been treated to a full meltdown among our True Progressive (TM) friends for the past two days—while the nation is still raw over the Newtown massacre—over the reports leaking out that President Obama is going to "cave" to Boehner and give him the Keys to the Kingdom, turning Social Security over to the corporatists and making you wait until you're on your deathbed to qualify for Medicare. It's predictable, and really not worth going over in too much detail. Much like the bomb throwers on the Right, those on the Left have a preternatural hatred of this president, distrusting him as much as denizens of Red State do, and look at any action and statement from him or his Administration as prelude to a betrayal. This is merely another milestone in the infantilization of our political culture, where total defeat is to be preferred to messy compromise in which you achieve at least some of your aims.

So, as with Mr. Marshall, let's focus on what Obama has been able to accomplish in the short few weeks since negotiations began in earnest.

During the last hostage negotiation, John Boehner wouldn't take a "grand bargain" where the ratio of revenue to cuts was 1:4. He couldn't sell that to his caucus, as it would have been seen to be a victory for compromise, which in the Tea Party dominated House was anathema.

Now? Boehner has agreed, if the reports are correct, to a 1:1 ratio between revenue and cuts. Good, no? Well, yes, but here's the rub: if he couldn't sell the 2011 grand bargain to his membership, he certainly won't be able to sell this.

But here's the other thing: the big business community,  mainstay of the GOP, has pretty much come out in favor of this grand bargain. They control the purse strings. So Boehner has to contend with that.

It's gone beyond that, however. The speaker has no control over his party. No one does, not him, not Cantor, not any other putative candidate for the Speakership. What Obama has done in a few weeks is reveal, once and for all, that the Republican Party as it stands today is totally unready to govern. Boehner won't bring any bill to the floor that doesn't have the support of his membership. But there is no bill that he could bring that would have that support.

The reason for this is very simple: any resolution will be seen as a victory for Obama. If he and Boehner come to an agreement, the public will see it as due mostly to the President's efforts. If we go off the cliff, the public has already made it clear that it will blame Boehner and his party, and demand that it follow the President's and Democrats' lead.

As I've said in other pieces, it's been obvious to me that Obama's overarching goal has been to break the 30 year long Republican fever which has gripped this country's governance. We are now facing a situation where those who bankroll the GOP will not countenance taking a risk with a rise in taxes and drastic spending cuts—and certainly not any more dithering with the debt limit. Boehner will be forced to take the President's offered hand, and pass a deal which will depend on Nancy Pelosi providing votes from her caucus. If the Tea Party is true to its word, this will set off a political bloodbath. This doesn't bode well for the next 2 years of governance; but it does set up the Democrats—backed by OFA's organizational muscle—to wrest the House away from Boehner and Cantor. Yes, the math doesn't favor it happening; but it didn't favor it happening going into 2006, either. 

In his analysis, Marshall goes on to say that Boehner is like Mahmoud Abbas, and it might be time for the Democrats to negotiate with the Hamas wing of the GOP. That's a bit further than I'd go; Abbas has no partner on the Israeli side; whereas Boehner knows all too well that Obama is waiting, with that welcoming grin on his face, for the Speaker to face the inevitable. Doing so will upend the Republicans. Where the pieces fall on the right will be hard to predict. But the country will see once again that there is one party working to govern for the good of all, and one party that is a cauldron of dysfunction. Win-win indeed.

Maddow: Entire conservative movement is ‘a complete mess

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

Thursday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow took stock of Republicans — from where they stand on the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations to their their overall message. If the wild, shouting-match free-for-all that went on under the Capitol dome Thursday night is any indication, the party is in complete disarray.

“Do you want to know what just happened in Washington?” she asked at the segment’s opening. “Do you want to know what just happened, with Congress just unexpectedly imploding and the Republicans in Congress dissolving into a huge internal fight including screaming matches within their own caucus? And then all of a sudden, they’re just turning off the lights and abandoning what they were doing and nobody really knows why, nobody really knows what happens next?”

It all started, apparently, with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Since taking his Senate seat in 2004, DeMint, a tea party favorite, has sponsored no major pieces of legislation, but has instead spent his time building a coalition and amassing a great deal of support against Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), who the tea party see as being a little too squishy on some of their most important issues.

Then, DeMint abruptly announced earlier this month that he’s leaving the Senate to chair the Heritage Foundation. In his farewell speech on Thursday, Maddow said, things got a little weird.

“I hope that we can create more common ground between the political parties,” DeMint said, “by showing everyone that ideas that work for their constituents and our constituents are right there in front of our faces, if we’re willing to set aside the pressure groups and special interests and let’s just focus on what’s working.”

The camera cut back to Maddow, who looked deeply skeptical. This is Jim DeMint, one of the most obstructive, anti-Obama Republicans on the Hill calling for comity and a focus on the practical? And telling the party to ignore pressure groups?

“Jim DeMint is leaving the Senate to go run a pressure group!” she said.

Then there was the equally abrupt departure of Dick Armey from another pressure group, FreedomWorks, earlier this month. Add to that, the strange sight of anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist appearing in media outlets this week saying that it’s alright for Republicans to sign on with Speaker Boehner’s Plan B budget proposal to forestall the fiscal cliff.

By Thursday afternoon, however, he had abandoned the Plan B ship and was recanting his support of Boehner.

“What’s going on?” Maddow asked. “We liberals have spent a generation, we’ve spent all this envious time studying the strength and depth and singular focus of the conservative movement, like they’ve got themselves so together. And then days like this, you pull back the curtain and it turns out it’s just this little tiny guy going, ‘I’m the big, powerful Oz! I’m the big powerful Oz! Somebody find the curtain!’”

“They are a complete mess,” she said. “They are a complete mess and I’m not talking about the Republican Party, I’m talking about the conservative movement and that’s more important, because the conservative movement is the dog and the Republican Party is the tail.”

“Because of the chaos right now in the conservative movement,” she continued, “in their K-Street, fake grassroots, big money, used-to-be-a-think-tank, revolving door, conservative influence lobbying, fundraising machine is such a mess right now, the way Republicans are trying to do policy on Capitol Hill is also a mess.”

Maddow then detailed the negotiating process thus far on the fiscal cliff in which President Barack Obama presented Congress with his terms, Boehner and Congressional Republicans responded with a counter-offer, which Obama took into account, made some concessions and presented a second plan.

Rather than offer a coherent response to the president’s plan, though, Boehner unveiled “Plan B,” an extravagant and ultimately impracticable wish-list of conservative demands. This sent the House Republican caucus into complete chaos and left us where we stand today, with the president’s counter-offer left unanswered by Congress, and House Republicans fighting amongst themselves before turning off the lights and leaving for the Christmas break.

Watch the clip, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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Five Overreactions To Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Proposal

By Scott Keyes/Think Progress

Yesterday, the Obama administration unveiled its proposal to avert the looming fiscal showdown. The plan included $1.6 trillion in increased taxes on the rich over the next decade, $400 billion in savings to be found in Medicare and other social programs, $50 billion in stimulus spending to begin next year, and an end to current debt ceiling rules.

This proposal is not new. It reflects the very policies Obama not only put forth in 2011, as Kevin Drum noted, but also campaigned on extensively this year. They are the very policies that the American public voted for in November when they granted Obama another four years. Exit polling also showed that 60 percent of voters wanted to see income taxes increased for wealthy Americans.

However, these facts didn’t stop conservatives from acting as though Obama had proposed the “Kill All The Puppies Act of 2012″. Here are five overreactions to Obama’s plan:

• Worse than surrender in the Civil War: Leading conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer likened Obama’s proposal to the terms of surrender offered to Confederates in the Civil War, only the president’s deal was worse. “It’s not just a bad deal, this is really an insulting deal… Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox and he lost the Civil War,” said Krauthammer.
• Out of a fairytale: Writing in her Wall Street Journal column, Kimberley Strassellambasted the plan as “something out of Wonderland and Oz combined.” She went on to argue that Obama wasn’t negotiating in good faith. “The most frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn’t an error.”
• “Nothing good can come of negotiating further”: RedState editor Erick Erickson, whosecounsel congressional Republicans regularly seek, advised the GOP to pack up, go home, and take the country over the cliff. “Nothing good can come of negotiating further,” Erickson wrote. “The GOP should pass what they want and promptly go home. Let the Democrats stay and sort things out. Dive.”
• “I’d walk out”: MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, said that his Party ought to walk out of negotiations, saying Obama’s proposal was solely meant to “provoke” House Republicans. Speaking on his morning show, Scarborough detailed what his reaction would have been had he been in negotiations: “I would have said, ‘We’re all busy people, this is a critical time, if you’re going to come over here and insult us and intentionally try to provoke us, you can do that but I’m going back to work now.’ And I’d walk out.”
• “Congress should dive headlong off fiscal cliff”: After a lengthy column detailing how going over the fiscal cliff “would shock the economy,” Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson advised GOPers to “dive headlong off fiscal cliff” following Obama’s proposal. “Republicans don’t have a lot of good choices right now,” Tucker wrote. “They might as well try it.”