Even by Washington’s repellent standards of cowardice and
blame-shifting, the nattering nincompoopery of the current sequester
debate astonishes.
Republicans want you to believe that the more than $500 billion in across-the-board defense-spending cuts over the next decade is President Obama’s fault. It was his idea, they say, and therefore his responsibility as commander in chief to see that these meat-ax defense reductions—due to begin on Jan. 2—don’t occur.
Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress, meanwhile, act as if their hands are tied by diabolical GOP obstructionists who won’t let an alternative to $1.2 trillion in domestic discretionary cuts (half from defense accounts and half from nondefense accounts) emerge to avoid potentially recession-inducing austerity.
Tuesday on CBS, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a former chairman of the House Budget Committee who undoubtedly knows better, used the third-person plural pronoun to make it sound as if this entire mess was the work of space aliens, the League of Shadows, Lord Voldemort’s dementors, or crazed economists jacked up on Red Bull, Cheetos, and Twizzlers.
“They said if we don’t do this thing, we’ll blow our heads off,” Panetta told Norah O’Donnell. “Well, now they’ve cocked the gun.”
Read more: http://nationaljournal.com/columns/all-powers/sequester-is-all-about-us--20120911
Republicans want you to believe that the more than $500 billion in across-the-board defense-spending cuts over the next decade is President Obama’s fault. It was his idea, they say, and therefore his responsibility as commander in chief to see that these meat-ax defense reductions—due to begin on Jan. 2—don’t occur.
Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress, meanwhile, act as if their hands are tied by diabolical GOP obstructionists who won’t let an alternative to $1.2 trillion in domestic discretionary cuts (half from defense accounts and half from nondefense accounts) emerge to avoid potentially recession-inducing austerity.
Tuesday on CBS, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a former chairman of the House Budget Committee who undoubtedly knows better, used the third-person plural pronoun to make it sound as if this entire mess was the work of space aliens, the League of Shadows, Lord Voldemort’s dementors, or crazed economists jacked up on Red Bull, Cheetos, and Twizzlers.
“They said if we don’t do this thing, we’ll blow our heads off,” Panetta told Norah O’Donnell. “Well, now they’ve cocked the gun.”
Read more: http://nationaljournal.com/columns/all-powers/sequester-is-all-about-us--20120911
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