Nick Gillespie responds to a recent Bob Woodward column:
In sort-of documenting the dysfunction of a government that can’t even trim chump change from its petty cash drawer, much less write and pass a goddamned budget, Woodward manages to also illustrate why press solons are pretty useless in this whole process too. Sequestration cuts aren’t odious, except to congenital pants-wetters on both sides of the aisle (such as the neo-con defense hawks at the American Enterprise Institute and Leon Panetta, who can’t abide a single dollar ever being cut from any military budget, even after the Second Coming of Christ and the beating of swords into non-voting GM shares). We’ve been racking up trillion-dollar annual deficits for years now, and the idea of cutting $3 trillion from future deficits over a 10-year period causes things to explode? That shouldn’t be a reach under any circumstances, but especially under one in which both parties agree that we need to stop spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need. If the leadership of both parties couldn’t agree to $3 trillion in deficit trims over a decade in which they expect to spend between $40 trillion and $47 trillion, they weren’t going to agree to cuts of $1.2 trillion anyway. That’s the the real story, and it’s one that need to be retold every single day.
Woodward’s invocation of today’s “vulture politics” and his by-comparison invocation of the good old Reagan days is ridiculously ahistorical, especially coming from one of the guys who presided over the past 40-plus years of American history. Today’s political situation isn’t unique in its “demonization” of the opposition. Jesus Christ, George McGovern likened Nixon to Hitler and Reagan was attacked in similar terms. As was Clinton (by Jerry Falwell, who credited the Man from Hope with multiple murders in Arkansas). And then there was also the Bushitler stuff and novels and faux-documentaries about Dubya’s assassination. Somehow, both sides somehow managed to pass budgets (as awful as they were). The fact that Boehner takes a lot of man-tan heat and Obama is called a socialist is light fare by comparison. What is different is the inability of our top men to freaking complete the most basic tasks required of them: to hash out what they government is going to spend each year according to basic and simple-to-understand legislative rule.
In the end, that is not something mystical or overly complicated or tough because they belong to different parties. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get done and while of course “staffers” will do most of the grunt work, Boehner and Obama — and Harry Reid, the hugely incompetent Senate leader who is arguably the single-most responsible villain in the whole dramedy, need to be running the show.
And when it comes to kicking their own asses, our triumvirate of leaders — Obama, Boehner, and Reid — should get in line behind the rest of us. In the end, we pay their tab, so we should be at the front of the line.
