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My firm prediction that the government would be shut down for between 5 and 7 days, not published here but explicitly stated to friends, was based on my certainty that Republicans needed a face-saving play to keep the tea bag caucus on board with Boehner. My guess was that this would come in the form of a short-term shutdown to satisfy the 'baggers, followed by an appeal to higher authority, such as reopening the government to restore "market confidence." Then we'd get a GOP declaration of victory, and their own well founded faith in having the history rewritten by party propagandists and broadcast on Fox.Well, I believe I got the "face-saving" aspect correct. But I truly did not predict that it would be Harry Reid and Obama who would give Boehner his political cover, and also several extra billion in cuts to sweeten the deal. Silly me.
I doubt even Round 1 (2011 budget) is over yet ("It's Not Over Yet"...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4yxoHwNzEE). If the "negotiation" is to cave and cave again the tendency is to want more and more. And this is just preamble to the 2012 election, oh sorry, budget debate. What a 3-ring circus heavy on the clowns.
Carnac the Magnificent
Carnac: Round 1 is over, with The Babyface bloody and in a stupor---so deep he doesn't know it's a stupor. We've got a debt ceiling issue coming up and then the FY12 budget. Round 2 will involve holding the nation's solvency hostage to much more radical cuts, as you say. Can it really be that President North Star is such a lackluster leader just because he wants to be seen as The Voice Of Reason? I'm now afraid that's about what the carcass has boiled down to. On the bright side, I've long said that nothing will get better until it gets horrifically worse, so we can now start imagining what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like.
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