Bipartisanship

“Whenever they talk about bipartisanship, I know that we are in for a royal screwing.”
(Someone really smart said this back a while ago, but I don’t remember who it was.)

From Obama’s SOTU Address:

Now, even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we will still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. More importantly, the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That’s why I’ve called for a bipartisan, Fiscal Commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The Commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans. And when the vote comes tomorrow, the Senate should restore the pay-as-you-go law that was a big reason why we had record surpluses in the 1990s.

Do you want to know the real reason why we had a surplus in the late 1990’s? It was a total fricking accident. No one saw it coming – a bubble that yielded a huge tax windfall. Surpluses are considered dangerous by our ruling elite, as they create the perception that money is avialable for things like education, health care, infrastructure. Bush’s first action as president was to eliminate the surpluses for the foreseeable future. No doubt a term-three Clinton would have done the same.

Here’s how absurd this president is – here’s what’s causing the “problem”:

President Obama is carrying forward the right wing strategy of running up massive deficits by means of tax cuts, military spending, and his particular charm, subsidies to Wall Street, and then turning to the American public and pleading for cuts in social programs to ease those deficits. It’s called bipartisanship. On the on the Republican right wing, courtesy of Grover Norquist, we know it is a conscious strategy. On the Democratic right wing, they are usually a bit more subtle – that is, Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” and had in place a real and dangerous plan to privatize Social Security, only to be thwarted by a need to bolster his public standing during the Monica scandal. (In one of the most cynical maneuvers that vile and ugly man ever engaged in, he became Social Security’s most stalwart defender to save his worthless political ass.)

No doubt the presidential commission that Obama advocates will call for privatization of Social Security (which actually runs a surplus) and huge cutbacks in the Medicas, while ignoring the effect of military spending and tax cuts. It’s a right wing wet dream, and if anything is clear to me after one year of this clown, it is that he is a closet right winger.

Scratch that. Scratch the word “closet.” He’s not even trying. He is openly taunting us with his right wing agenda, deliberately rubbing Democratic faces in it, knowing they will follow him to hell and back.