Friday was another amazing night in Obama land. A sitting president attending the opposition party's retreat and submitting himself to a Q&A from them, British style. Never has this been done before. Some have given a speech and then left for their private meeting. And not only did he take Q&A, but it was televised around the world. CSPAN servers crashed because of the volume of viewers that could not get it via broadcast.
Though like many politicians, he did skirt a few questions, but for the most part he nailed them to right. His clarity and understanding of the problems was very impressive. Challenging the miss statement and out right lies put forth by the Republicans was incredible. Bring the Bush revisionist back to reality about the mess he inherited was masterful. Republicans demonize him for using a teleprompter for his speeches, but his command of the issue and not using a teleprompter at this meeting or the town hall meeting he has held, shows that he does not need it scripted as did Reagan and W Bush.
Many of the Republicans are now very sorry they agreed to have it televised. They truly thought they could force him into a corner on his policies. But instead he back them into a wall, showing how petty they are, how they are not willing to work with the Democrats on any legislation for fear of upsetting the Tea Party people. He also demonstrated how the Republicans will NOT accept they lost the election and now a minority. They want it their way or NO way. So they demand take all their amendments and drop all the Democrats bills and that is the only way they will agree to a bill for passage. Now that is childish and outright stupid. The people no longer mean anything to the Republicans, other than their core voters. It clearly identified them as the party of NO on anything, even proposals that they have sponsored in the past.
What drives me crazy is that the Republicans had Bush's full first term when they controlled both houses and the White House and did not pass health care reform. They did expand Medicare with Part D, the prescription drug benefit, but without a way to pay for it. So the nearly trillion dollars spend on that program had to be borrowed, plus they reduced revenue with the tax reduction for the wealthiest. BTW that was suppose to help the economy, but in fact it destroyed the economy, along with deregulation. Middle-class income was stagnant and high wage earners saw huge gains. No trickle down in the plan. To sustain their lifestyle, the middle-class borrowed way beyond their means and the credit market collapsed. This all during the Bush administration.
As the president pointed out at this meeting, the unemployment figures from the day of the election to when his stimulus package was passed and started to work, was the period of the greatest job loss, all relative to the prior administrations economic policies. After his plan kicked in, jobs became stable with some modest growth. With out that package, we could well be 15 to 20% unemployment in the country. Let's be thankful that it stopped at 10% and falling.
For me this meeting demonstrated one fact. Don't count on any Republican to support legislation from this president, even if it is something they want. They are obstructionist until they can regain control of both houses and the White House again, and then watch out. I fear a great depression will occur. We'll call it GDII.
The NeoConservatives plan is to bleed the treasury dry, borrow until we can borrow no more and that will force the nation to abandon all social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, and will force the privatization of all these services. The government will be reduced to the Pentagon, what's left of the Treasury, and state department. Everything else will be privatized. That is their goal.
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