Oh, not in the way he thinks he is - just look at the full context of his rollicking Los Angeles fundraiser last night:
Barack Obama said Saturday that the Republican Party has "gone off the deep end" with its messy failure to elect a new speaker of the House of Representatives....
exObama addressed the drama at an expensive fundraiser at a private home in Los Angeles....
Obama described himself as not intrinsically partisan and said some members of his party have faulted him for not being partisan enough. [emphasis added]
"But I will tell you at this moment in history, the choices are stark. And facts, evidence and values are on our side. And the other side has gone off the deep end," Obama said. [emphases added]
i.e. It isn't just Tea Partiers who have "gone off the deep end".
But The One nails it here:
Obama added: "And what you're witnessing in the House fight right now is that even deeply conservative folks [like John Boehner] are not considered ideologically pure enough and we would rather burn the House down than admit the possibility of democratic process that requires compromise." [emphasis added]
The man is absolutely correct, my Tea Party friends. He's also the Colossus of hypocrites, since he never compromises with Republicans or negotiates with them or even acknowledges the GOP's existence other than to defame and ridicule them. But he's 100% spot-on in those particular words.
And that is precisely the kind of humiliation that Tea Party purity fetishism is bringing down upon the GOP and the conservative movement. Sure, the Dems are going to defame and ridicule us no matter what we do - that's a given - but do we have to feed them ammunition to use against us? Now the so-called House "Freedom" Caucus is making noises that even Paul Ryan isn't "pure" enough for them:
House conservatives are not all in line to pick Wisconsin-1 Representative Paul Ryan to replace House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH8, with the chamber's right-wing Freedom Caucus members saying they still back Florida-10 Representative Daniel Webster for the key spot.
Even though there's not a snowball's chance in hell of him getting 218 votes.
Others, meanwhile, told the Hill that Ryan's policies, combined with his lack of interest for the job, means there are more viable lawmakers to take over when outgoing House Speaker John Boehner leaves office later this month.
Like Webster, I suppose?
“Last I knew, [Ryan] definitely didn’t want to do it," Representative Tim Huelskamp, R-KS1, said.
This is deliberate obtusity. Either that or Huelskamp is trying to make a virtue of naked ambition. Ryan not wanting the Speakership - and I'll say again that NOBODY wants that job, not even Webster if he would be honest about it - isn't the issue. Ryan is NEEDED for that job to bridge the gargantuan chasm that Tea Partiers have created in the House GOP caucus with their insurrectionary foolishness. Kevin McCarthy dropped out because he accepted that, especially after his chowderheaded Benghazigate blunder of last week, he couldn't reach 218 votes - same as Webster. So why can't Webster and the so-called "Freedom Caucus" make that same concession and remember that we're all supposed to be on the same "team" and <GASP> compromise on Paul Ryan as the next Speaker and stop feeding Barack Obama one-liners that make him look reasonable?
He also criticized the two-year budget agreement Ryan worked on with Washington Democrat Senator Patty Murray in 2013, saying that lawmakers in both parties want to break up the agreement less than two years later.
Sure - it was a compromise. Compromises are generally half-a-loaf agreements that nobody likes, but are the best that can be done at that point in time. Politics is a fluid, fractally chaotic process that never remains static. It requires maneuvering, sometimes taking a step backward now in order to take two or three steps forward later. It isn't, and cannot be, nothing but "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," endless frontal attacks, perpetual Pickett's charges. Not if you want to win, anyway. That's not how politics works.
But Tea Partiers don't care how politics works. Or about winning, either, it would seem. Unless they've redefined "winning" in accordance with who the "enemy" is.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan once again reiterated that his group had already backed Webster, and declined to comment on Ryan for the job.
Representative John Fleming, R-LA4., meanwhile, called the idea of a Ryan groundswell "media-driven," as he has "made it clear he's not interested."
A strawman comment. Nobody said there was a Ryan "groundswell". He's simply the best choice for Speaker at this embarrassing nadir in the current tenure of this House Republican majority. Something that, to his credit, Michigan-3 GOP Representative Justin Amash, at least, was willing to admit.
So let's take updated stock of the situation: We had a perfectly good and staunchly conservative House Speaker in John Boehner, whom TPers loathed because of his inability to perform legislative miracles; he finally got tired of the cat-herding BS and quit (i.e. "Boehner's Revenge"); TPers were going to wind up with a LESS conservative Speaker in Kevin McCarthy until he proved himself to be "not ready for prime time"; and now TPers would apparently prefer to insist upon the ridiculous Daniel Webster, who can't win, and have no Speaker at all than even think of compromising on the perfectly good and staunchly conservative - and legislatively practical - Paul Ryan. Have I missed anything?
Allow me to employ this metaphor: Tea Partiers are acting like bratty children, and in the process making both the "GOP establishment" AND the Democrats look like the adults in this equation. Is that the optics y'all want to create? Because I'll tell you here and now that the longer TPers persist in this nonsense, the more it looks like candid reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment