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David Brooks is everything that's wrong inside the Beltway. And yet, he is reliably on one or the other of the Sunday shows every damn week. In just one minute of soundbyte, Brooks was so full of wrong and stupidity that it's hard not to pick it apart and just respond:
First, let’s just say, what’s happening in Washington right now is pathetic. When you think about what the Revolutionary generation did, what the Civil War generation did, what the WWII generation did, we’re asking not to bankrupt our children and we’ve got a shambolic, dysfunctional process.I think most of the blame still has to go to the Republicans.
How very generous of you, David. Let's be honest, ALL of the blame belongs to the Republicans. The fiscal "cliff" was created because the Republicans refused to vote on deficit reduction earlier and the "crisis" was created by bozos like David Brooks in the media. In a fragile economic recovery, we don't need to focus on the damn deficit. We can't cut spending. That will contract the economy and EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THESE. CONSERVATIVES. KNOWS. THAT. and want the economy to struggle more so that they can say, "See, those leftist liberal policies hurt America!"
They’ve had a brain freeze since the election.
Since the election? Be honest. They haven't employed their brains since the Eisenhower era.
They have no strategy. They don’t know what they want and they haven’t decided what they want.
C'mon, Bobo. You know what they want. They haven't hidden it. They want Obama to fail as a president. EVERYTHING they do is for that end. Not for the American people. Not for the good of the country. Everything is a political calculus to hurt the Democratic Party and President.
But if I had to fault President Obama...
Do you have to? Why?
... I would say sometimes he governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.
They're called the Democratic Party. You can call them by their correct name.
He comes in here and he will not….he’ll talk to a Boehner, but he won’t with the other Republicans.
Besides being factually incorrect--not that that has ever stopped David Brooks--John Boehner is the Speaker of the House and Majority Leader. Nothing gets voted on that he doesn't sanction. Doesn't it make sense to talk to head guy? Or is Obama expected to show his good faith (and Brooks-like misunderstanding of how government runs) by talking to every single Republican in Congress? How is that effective?
He hasn’t built the trust.
On the contrary, I think that the Republicans trust that if they stall and posture for as long as possible, President Obama will concede just about everything to get a deal done. That's the only way they have any negotiating ground or leverage and four years of dealmaking precedent to rely on.
Boehner actually made a pretty serious concession, $800 billion in tax revenues, probably willing to go up on rates, but the trust wasn’t there to get that done.
Boehner's own party didn't trust him to get that deal done. That didn't get scuttled by Obama, that was scuttled by the extreme fringe of the ....wait for it....REPUBLICANS. Nice revisionism, Bobo.
If the President wants to get stuff done in the next four years, it’s gotta be a lot more than making the intellectual concessions. It’s got to get to the place where Republicans say, ‘okay, we’ll take a risk, this guy won’t screw us.’
Holy FSM, the Republicans are all about screwing. It's just that they want to be the ones clearly screwing the President, not vice versa. There's been no reason for the President to trust the Republicans, but this intellectual heavyweight of conservative thought can't or won't admit it.
Again, Brooks is everything wrong inside the Beltway.