Warner Being Warner: Pandering, False Equivalence.

Please take a look at Mark Warner being Warner in a way that is just so hurtful to Dems this year.  Says he:

I think it’s going to  be very close.  I know he’s got problems in SW Virginia He’s doing better in Eastern and Northern Virginia.

And I’ll tell you this much, I’m supporting President Obama, but I also am awful tired of all the negative ads. I wish we wouldn’t be spending  2 billion dollars on tv tearing each other down. That money could be used for interstate 81 and scholarships.  Hopefully, we’ll get through this election like we’ve gotten through all the others and get back to solving our country’s problems, especially the debt and deficit.

He just cannot seem to help himself.  He can’t endorse the president without trying to distance himself at the same time. He can’t talk about health care reform without saying there’s a lot that needs to be fixed (in the Affordable Care Act).  

His effort to create out of nothing a false equivalence between the two parties regarding negative ads is appalling. The GOP lie machine spins the lies faster than we can rebut them. But Warner pretends both parties are doing it. He also implies that it’s “negative” to refute a pile of lies. I call it necessary. And there is nothing wrong with that. Such a false equivalence is cowardly, shameful, and self-serving. Lying down and playing dead will not work. And putting up only “positive” ads won’t work either.  

Along the way, Warner panders to Bristol Motor Speedway fans, coal, enemies of “ObamaCare,” and Peter Peterson’s “deficit” hawkeroos. (Hawkeroos are two-faced show-offs who like to prattle away at how spending conscious they are. But they won’t make the rich pay their fair share. No, sir.)

What is really disconcerting is his self-adulating self-absorption. He is posturing every minute. Warner’s myth of the “radical center” is really all about such posturing and it’s also about trying to reinvent as virtuous all those things he doesn’t stand for, but should, like enabling the EPA to keep our air and water clean. Or helping the 99% as opposed to the wealthy who don’t need more tax cuts. It is as if he’s out there saying, “Look at me.  I’m better than all of you. I am especially better than President Obama.” (No, you are not, Mark.)

Additionally, in this video, he throws a bone to Medicare supporters, never mind that, because he supports a variation of the Simpson-Bowles budget, he has, through his earlier proposal, in mind to wreck havoc on Social Security, rendering it a program primarily for the poor and leaving the Middle Class high and dry.

I’m glad for his support of Medicare and that he doesn’t plan to privatize Medicare.  But that’s not enough. Far from it. Much earlier (than this video) his Gang of Six “plan,” while raising some revenue still follows the absurd (at this point) tax-cut notion of “fixing” the economy by reducing revenue. Worst, by targeting Social Security, he pretends that Social Security has something to do with the deficit. He knows it does not. What he won’t tell you is pols have borrowed from us seniors and they do not want to pay it back. Not to is theft from the American people (all of them, not just today’s seniors.) All he needs to do leave the future fix to Social Security out of the ‘deficit reduction effort.  Recommend that separately the ceiling on FICA taxes be removed. That alone would fix it. But, no….

Warner has been a crusader for conservative financial ideology, ignoring that serious deficit reduction in the coming year or two would push us into a greater recession. He also won’t admit that stopping the Bush tax cuts would go a long way to fixing our deficit problems. So would scrubbing programs our military doesn’t even want.

BTW, Mark knows that the money spent on the ads cannot literally be diverted to fix I81.  And no doubt he’d be spending lots of money on ads himself were he to run. He is so running in 2016. Even in a year when President Obama’s race is far, far more important than his prospects some future year, he can’t help but dig into the President.