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Extraordinary Day: Obama Vents (And Rightly So)

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The machinations of right-wing destructos continues. No matter how much our president bends to GOP pressure, it will never be enough. The GOP is not operating in good faith. During this presidency, the GOP never has. Enough is enough! I personally thought it was enough quite some time ago. I thought the President should use the Fourteenth Amendment and lift the debt ceiling. Holding the nation hostage as the GOP has been doing is unAmerican. And they stepped up their subversion of America’s economy today. There have been many low points in this unseemly train wreck.  But perhaps the lowest point came today.

John Boehner’s behavior in the face of imminent default of the United States has been reprehensible. Today, he would not return the president’s call(s). When the president finally caught up with him, what ensued, apparently, was (to put it mildly) not productive.  From what the President says here in this video, the failure to return calls was the least of it. Ultimately, Boehner, like Cantor before him, walked.

All of this is happening because GOP opportunists and predatory disaster capitalists want to use the need to raise the debt ceiling to impose their will on the majority in this country. They  want to circumvent the 2008 presidential election, the Senate election of 2008, and the will of the overwhelming majority of the American.

The majority says leave Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone. Give us jobs. President Obama said he has stopped listening to his base and the Republicans should do the same. Trouble is, long ago Obama dissed his base and he has not really ever listened to it. John Boehner and Eric Cantor, on the other hand are letting about 25% of the most extreme Republicans try to dictate that the two of them hold this nation hostage.

It’s beyond me how anyone could possibly be a Republican after this toying with the economic security of our country.  As some of you well know, KathyinBlacksburg is pretty irritated with certain Dems, including one from Virginia. But even she recognizes that the President is right that he has met the other side in good faith. The GOP doesn’t listen to Americans, so I have nothing to say to them.  

To our side of the aisle, the time has come for a debt ceiling lift and a more careful approach to deficit reduction done with more time to work out the details. This is far too important and the set of “packages” being considered have such grave consequences.  With the long-term implications (especially of the cementing of procedural  constraints in the Gang’s plan) to have ANY of these plans shoved down our throats without significant airing and debate is unacceptable. A draft of bullet points does not a Gang of 6 plan make either.  This is not how a republic should be run.  And the GOP holds nearly all the responsibly for what’s wrong. It’s just that the Dems should not keep trying to out-Republican Republicans. Americans want compromise, but not when all the compromising is done by one side.

I want to add a few words here about the blatant disrespect of the President by the GOP leadership. No president in the past sixty years has been treated with such disrespect by the supposedly loyal opposition. Where is the loyal opposition now? Or is it a concept that “only Democrats must demonstrate”?  

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