If Sean Hannity and Senator Ted Cruz really believe in the shutdown strategy they’ve long been advocating as a means to derail the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, why are they now pretending it’s not theirs?
You may recall that Sean Hannity was for shutting down the government before he started acting as though he were against it. For example, in July, Hannity advised Republicans “to just put their foot down, stand on principal and stop calculating what political impact is going to be felt here. Fund the rest of the government, but just defund Obamacare. And then if the Democrats want to shut down the government, then let them shut it down.” In March, Hannity's message for Republicans who oppose Affordable Care was, “to shut the government down and be labeled, ‘The full faith and credit of the United States is in jeopardy’ – which is not true - but if they really want to do that, that’s what it will take. I want them to do it.”
As for Cruz, The Atlantic Wire noted today:
If you’ve forgotten, Republican leaders were initially opposed to shutting down the government. House Speaker John Boehner spoke out against it. But Cruz and other conservatives campaigned for the strategy. In a speech September 19, Cruz said the last shutdown had a pretty a good outcome: “If House Republicans hadn’t stood up in 1995, we wouldn’t have seen those kind of public policy results that benefit the country,” Cruz said. “Because Republicans stood their ground.”
But now that the PR doesn’t seem to be going so well for Republicans, Cruz and Hannity are backpedaling so fast, it would be funny if there weren’t so much at stake.
Fox News did its part for the PR lies by calling its video of Cruz’ visit to the Hannity show: Sen. Cruz urges lawmakers to move beyond partisan politics.
As if Hannity is anything but partisan politics.
But Hannity and Cruz spent nearly 7 minutes on a national cable news network pretending that they’re fighting a Democratic government shutdown.
“This is Harry Reid’s shutdown,” Cruz said, proving he’s dishonest as well as cowardly. And then for more giggles, he called it, “the perfect example of liberal arrogance.” Yeah, that’s putting aside partisan politics, alright. For extra putting-aside-partisanship points, Cruz brought up the debunked GOP attack line, “Apparently, their view is, the president should negotiate with the nation of Iran but not with Congress.”
Hannity actually sounded like he was reciting scripted lines as he said, “I want to understand this. …(Harry Reid) is going to subordinate, literally, compassion and decency for partisanship? He won’t keep the parks open? He won’t allow the vets to go to World War II? He’s not going to fund the NIH? Even if it’s gonna help one kid with cancer? I mean that’s pretty sick."
Not as sick as pretending you’re against this after demanding others be for it. But Hannity had more compassion and non-partisanship as he added, “What a twisted, old…” His voice trailed off as he realized he might be going a bit too far in his description of Reid.
But wait, there’s more. Cruz said, with a straight face: “Harry Reid and President Obama believe this shutdown benefits them politically. So they don’t want it to end.”
So, Ted, is that an admission that your plan backfired so now you’re trying to pretend it was a Democratic idea all along? Or just a quick way to try to duck the heat that's coming from your own party?
Cruz went on to promote the very scheme Bill O’Reilly called him out on the night before – trying to fund those parts of the government that are popular in order to continue his (futile) battle to defund Obamacare. But, of course, Hannity was all for the charade. “They don’t want to open the VA,” Cruz said with his concerned face, “because Harry Reid wants to hold veterans hostage in order to force Obamacare on everyone. …He thinks veterans don’t deserve the same treatment that men and women of the active military do. …We need to honor those commitments and we need to put the partisan politics of Barack Obama and Harry Reid behind us.”
Have you upchucked yet?
If not, you might want to take some ginger ale before reading further. Hannity trotted out a line I heard at least two other times on Fox today, not counting the hyping on Fox Nation: that the Obama administration sent more guards to the World War II memorial than it had to Benghazi. But you have to give Hannity style points for sounding like he had just thought of it.
“Well, Sean, I don’t think anyone is surprised, although I think we’re saddened every day by the political gamesmanship of this administration,” Cruz said in his saddened voice.
“Partisanship trumps everything in the world of Reid and Obama,” Hannity said, without a trace of irony, as he closed out the interview.
ACA is the law of the land, complete with a Supreme Court seal of approval.
GOP is nothing but a party of whining lawbreakers.
The “delay” that the right wing and the GOP want to inflict on the ACA is not intended to “work the wrinkles out” and they know it. If anything, the right wing should stop talking around the truth here. The actual goal of the right wing is to keep as much of the ACA from going into effect as possible, and simultaneously to make it look as expensive as possible. Were this goal to work, the GOP could then hold the ACA off past the 2014 midterms, at which point they would hope to win the Senate back and then try for the 60th time to repeal the ACA entirely. The right wing goal was never to fix the ACA – it was to get rid of it as yet another way of trying to attack the Democrats and this President. The right wing got away with similar chicanery during the Clinton presidency when they torpedoed Hillarycare. And now they’re trying anything they can to kill health care reform under President Obama. It’s fairly transparent what they’re doing, and one wishes they would stop pretending otherwise.
As for the rant about rich Democrat politicians, I frankly don’t know what relevance that has to this debate. Having voted in a Progressive manner for years, I’ve learned to keep an eye on politicians of all sides and not issue blanket condemnations like that. It’s one thing to have an issue with a group like the hard right of the GOP voting in lockstep to attack the government. It’s another to make strange sniping comments about Democrats’ broken promises. Granted, the Dems haven’t been able to do all that they’ve promised over the years. Granted, the Dems have done plenty of things I’ve had issues with, and Progressives have voiced those time and time again. (And if you want to see evidence of that, just head over to the website for Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, or over to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and you can find a treasure trove of material doing exactly that. Of particular interest to you should be Goodman’s Election Day interview with Bill Clinton in 2000.)
But it’s strange to hear a supposed Progressive saying that he doesn’t know of any “quality Progressives of color in our party”. How about Keith Ellison? How about Barbara Lee? How about the Congressional Black Caucus? How about the Progressive Democrats of America? One wonders if this poster did ANY research in this area before putting on the mantle of the left to try to condemn them from within.
And again, the Harry Reid response from yesterday was not what the right wing is deceptively editing it to sound like. He and Chuck Shumer both responded to a gotcha question that was intended to embarrass him. It doesn’t matter who asked that question. In fact, Reid showed surprise that Dana Bash would ask something like that. But the response was in concert with Shumer, who correctly pointed out “Why pit one against the other?” Meaning, why should we be telling sick children they need to compete with veterans as to who gets funding this week? And Reid properly continued the thought with “Why would we want to do that?” Again, the correct solution to this dilemma is for the GOP to do their job and fund the government. Then you wouldn’t have any issue of one group or another being put in such an untenable position. As Reid pointed out, having the GOP pick and choose which parts of the government they feel like funding this week is no way to manage a country. To follow that path would allow a small group of extremists to dictate terms to the rest of us. And that’s not going to happen.
The giveaway here is the line about “impending cracking of our support.” This makes sense coming from a Republican. The Dems certainly aren’t in that situation – the polls clearly show that the public is quite aware of who generated this problem and whose intransigence is keeping it going. The GOP doesn’t get to cheerlead for a shutdown for months and then run away from the consequences after they take us off a cliff. The cracking of support is certainly being felt by GOP politicians who are more and more openly rebelling against the hard right in the House and against the foolishness of Ted Cruz. And if they don’t stop the bleeding fairly soon, that cracking may get a lot louder. Further intransigence by the right wing can only result in a disaster for the GOP in the 2014 midterms – something that could hurt the party far more than they’re willing to publicly admit right now.
I personally find it interesting that President Obama has been able to work with Putin and even talk with the Iranian president, but that the GOP still refuses to work with him. I’m not sure if the GOP has figured out that they have now staked out more extreme territory than Syria or Iran. That’s certainly an achievement, but not one I’d think they’d be proud of.
And as we’ve already established, Harry Reid doesn’t want sick children to die. Nor does any other politician. But the GOP extremists don’t get to make demands and dictate terms while they are refusing to do their job in D.C. If the GOP were truly concerned about all the various areas of government that are not being funded – whether those be National Parks or whether those be medical research grants, they could fund them in five minutes – by allowing a simple yes or no vote on the budget in the House. They refuse to do this because they wish to keep this shutdown going, and because they don’t know how to get themselves out of this confrontation now that they’re in it.
As for the funding of the military, there are two answers to that issue. First, the vote on making sure that active military get their paychecks was held as a failsafe before the GOP shut the government down. The idea was that IF the GOP refused to fund the government, all sides agreed that active duty military shouldn’t be penalized. Once the GOP took us off the cliff, that failsafe went into effect. The fact that all politicians recognized that you can’t have military defending this country abroad for free isn’t a reason to attack Harry Reid or anyone else. If anything, it shows that Reid and the Democrats have indeed been trying to work with the GOP – but all that’s been coming out of the right wing has been a series of stubborn demands. I’m sure that the GOP and their supporters would have loved to have the talking point of saying that the Democrats were anti-military. Since they don’t have that, they now wish to play the Fox News game of picking and choosing which parts of the government they want to support. And that’s not going to happen.
Democrats don’t “all vote the party line”, as the historical record shows. But it does show that the GOP has voted in lockstep against anything it could that came from this President or from the Democrats. The GOP is proud of its partisan refusal to work with anyone, which is frankly a strange position for any politician to be taking. If anyone should be explaining the lack of bi-partisanship, it’s the GOP right wing, which has generated a pointless government shutdown just so it could make the 40th or 50th attempt to attack health care reform.
The closing of National Parks, which very much do have personnel assigned to them, is of course a direct consequence of the GOP shutting down government spending. Since there is no money to keep those services only, any of these places has the doors closed, or simply has a barrier up to let people know that the area is not accessible until the funding comes back – since the normal staff that is paid to monitor the area is not going to be present. That’s not hard to figure out, but it seems that the GOP wants to make hay out of it for some reason. If anything is suspicious about this, it’s the speed with which people like Gohmert and Bachmann frantically raced over to the World War II Memorial to get a photo op, when they should have been voting on the floor of the House to approve the spending bill that could have solved the problem.
As for the name-calling, the GOP would do well to stop that on their own side before lecturing anyone else on the subject. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are understandably frustrated with the GOP’s refusal to do their jobs and their bizarre behavior over the past five years. How else do you talk about a group of people who openly advocates for shutting down the government, who repeatedly demonizes people with whom they disagree, who repeatedly makes untrue statements about basic facts, and who decides to play a game of chicken with the U.S. economy just to score cheap political points?
There is a solution to the current problem – the right wing will simply need to admit they made a mistake and move on from this debacle. They’re not going to be getting concessions in exchange for doing their basic job. They’re not going to get away with trying to hold the country hostage. They can either back down quickly and get things moving again, or they can hold out for two weeks. The longer they hold out, the more damage they’ll do to their own re-election chances next year. The question now is at what point the damage level is too much for them to withstand.
I am a progressive, but am embarrased by those in congress pretending to be progressive. There is nothing to gain by name calling, spinning, lying. Our side can prevail by talking straight with people. Hypocritical, rich, old, white people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are certainly not what I’d call Progressive leaders. They are part of the 1 percent! They are as bad as the right. They are closeted republicans who keep promising to take care of the middle class like we need them and can’t survive without their superior intelligence. They have been promising the moon to minorities for years and never come through. Only promise the same stuff every election. And they keep getting richer. Why aren’t there any quality Progressives of color in our party? If we want to “progress”, we need to clean up our ranks and really make sure the people representing our side make cogent arguments instead of name calling, and spouting buzzwords. They are getting too big headed and careless. We have to have these people answer the questions I posited to shore up some impending cracking of our support. I mean, Harry Reid saying what he did was inexcusable and careless. A person of his supposed intelligence should know better. And he was being questioned by a CNN reporter, not someone from Fox. She is a friendly and he blew it badly.
Teabagger-caused Government shutdown Day #2: It’s a big deal, and it’s the fault of Harry Reid and that black guy living in our White House.
Can’t wait for the spin when the Teabaggers cause a default on the US debt.
Fox News seems to be running away from the fact that the House GOP shut down the government by attaching unreasonable demands to what should have been a routine budget submission. The House GOP actually had this budget in hand since March, but chose to wait til the last second to precipitate a standoff. Then they tried to play the brinkmanship game through the weekend, only to be frustrated when the Senate didn’t come in on Sunday to spend the day in a pointless back-and-forth. When they were reminded on Monday to simply do their job, the House GOP responded with yet another series of demands. Predictably, they got nowhere with this and we now can see the results.
Adding nonsense to the fire, we have the spectacle of the GOP legislators running over to the World War II Memorial to decry the closing of National Parks. Louie Gohmert and Michelle Bachmann practically sprinted to make sure they could get their faces on camera as they posed in the act of making sure that veterans could visit the Memorial without admitting that they had been the ones to cause the closing in the first place.
And adding insult to injury, the GOP is now trying to twist the statements of Harry Reid to make it sound as though he dismissed the plight of sick children during the shutdown. During a strange gotcha moment with CNN’s Dana Bash on Wednesday, Bash tried lobbing the bomb of asking why the Senate wouldn’t agree to the piecemeal funding feints being tossed over by the House GOP. She knew the answer before she asked it – the Senate and President Obama are not about to be trapped into the game of piece-by-piece only approving what sections of the government the GOP wants to fund. She knew that the simple solution is for the House GOP to bring the clean CR to the floor for an up or down vote. That would fund everything, including funding for veterans and for sick children. But the GOP refuses to do that – they want to use the veterans and children as props, so they’re trying to drag the stalemate out and see if they can get everyone else to bend to their idea of shutting everything down to make sure that the ACA doesn’t get any more funding. Bash’s gotcha question about why not get the money to the sick children was intercepted by Chuck Shumer, who said “Why pit one against the other?” Reid then responded in light of Shumer’s comments, adding “Why would we want to do that?” and noted that he has people at Nellis who would ask why they weren’t getting their funding either.
The point of the whole exercise is that the House GOP needs to do its job and simply pass that clean CR. The longer they continue this exercise, the longer the problem will continue. At this point, I believe it will stretch into the deadline for the Debt Limit, and both issues will be conjoined. Except that at that point, the GOP will literally have the value of the dollar in their hands. If they choose to continue listening to Fox News, there could well be a problem, which is why President Obama warned of the potential on CNBC. Hopefully, they’ll learn their lesson before they drag the economy into a deeper recession than the one they caused during the Bush presidency.
Rafael is in for a rude wake-up call when the Elite Washington GOP Power Machine gets through with him, politically. The boys are in the backroom planning its battle against the Tea Pots in 2014. It’s going to get real nasty.
Who needs Al Qaeda when you have homegrown terrorists like the Tea Pots, led by their leader, Rafael?
The Tea Party controlled GOP does not care about the working class. They rather see America destroyed than see Americans receive affordable heath care. The masses must do everything in their power to make sure these anti-American wackos are never elected to any office.
Millionaire Hannocchio is a self-serving mad man who built his wealth through lies, dating back to his early years in radio. He is a vindictive man who can’t handle rejection from other people.
The Stop Hannity Express knows what type of man Hannocchio is behind the curtains. His broadcasting career would come to a screeching halt if his audience learned of his checkered past.
Yeah, Slanthead was milking this lie for all it’s worth today on the radio, even after the on-scene reporter told him that the WW II vets were allowed to visit the memorial.
Does this qualify as the most vile, outrageous shutdown lie yet? Or maybe it was Hannity’s good buddy, the psychotic failed Philadelphia shyster Mark Levin who lied yesterday that Obama was denying vets medical care?
Isn’t it amazing that the most vociferous defenders of America’s warriors are those right wing chickenhawks who’ve beat the drums loudest, sending them to die and be wounded by the thousands in their illegitimate wars!!
And then they wonder why we won’t blame Harry Reid.
That, ladies and gentlemen… is Dumbfuckery 3.1.
Just wait and see.
Murdoch has shown here in Australia that he just doesn’t care about the economy or how much his Tea Party style politics hurts workers.
I’d like to dedicate this quote to those hopelessly lost souls in the GOTea over in Congress..
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein