What really happened – we lost, big time
Dammit! I’m sorry, I don’t care what anybody says, being a progressive is ridiculously hard. We have leaders who pretend that we have no principles. We have leaders that don’t stand up to combat the craziness coming from conservatives on a daily basis. Who are these leaders? Who voted them in? Oh yeah, we did. Well, our “leadership” basically said to the progressive movement that we don’t care. We don’t care what it is that you think. We don’t care if you do represent the majority of Americans. All we want to do is bend over to the Republicans.
So, we’ve been wrangling with conservatives… No, that’s not right. We’ve been wrangling with the Tea Party for over a month. To be honest, negotiations started more than six months ago. We, the progressive movement, said that responsible deficit reduction should not take place until we had enough job growth. We said that reduction in federal spending would hurt the economy. We also mentioned that federal spending makes up approximately 25% of our GDP. Our fallback position was that we needed a balanced approach. We needed those who are enjoying the lowest taxes in over 40 years to simply pay their fair share. Nobody suggested we go back to a tax rate of 90% on the richest Americans. That’s a tax rate we had in this country as late as 1960 when John Kennedy took office. Remember that the 1960s and 1950s are a magical time for conservatives. They want to take us all back to that time frame when America was “right.”
With the mainstream media not wanting to be “too critical” of the Tea Party, we never got serious coverage of this ridiculous showdown. We never got ABC, NBC or CBS to dedicate a whole show to the stupidity of holding the American economy hostage. Sure, they had lead stories on it and they spent a good five or six minutes on the subject, but then they would quickly cut away to something that was completely and totally meaningless — like a skunk with its head in a Skippy jar. We never had any of the “serious” newscasters sit down with the American people and say that this was just unacceptable. We have one party basically stating that they’re going to hold their breath and not listen to anything that anyone else has to say until they get their way. That’s exactly what happened. On one side, we had the Democrats tripping all over themselves to say that they don’t support a measure that they ended up voting for. On the other side, we have Tea Party Republicans who are unhappy in spite of the fact they got everything they asked for. Let me say that again. The most conservative part of the Republican Party got everything that they asked for. They got trillions of dollars in spending cuts with no promise of revenue enhancements. None. Sure, there’s a bipartisan super Congress that is supposed to agree on $1 trillion worth of savings. Bipartisan. I’m really starting to hate this word because everything that seems to come out of these bipartisan commissions is overwhelmingly conservative in nature. It would be like progressives getting behind closed doors, being gagged and tied up in the corner, while the conservatives discuss whatever topic this commission is supposed to discuss. They only untie the progressives when it’s time for them to sign the document. I suspect they planned to get more conservative ideas about cutting essential programs and both houses of Congress would approve the insanity.
I know that it is only six in the morning but I feel like I need a drink.
