AP: "GOP policies led to fiscal cliff blowup" - Republicans Are The Cause of Federal Dysfunction

[TomCADem]

It is so rare that a news publisher deviates from the false equivalency that infects journalism today and calls out Republicans for growing increasingly extreme and out of touch. Indeed, the corporate media rarely highlights statements by prominent Republicans like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush who said his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and Reagan would have a hard time being nominated by today's Republican activists.

http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-gop-policies-led-fiscal-cliff-blowup-222503056--politics.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans seem shocked by their party's meltdown on the so-called fiscal cliff. They shouldn't be.

The uncompromising conservatives who blocked Speaker John Boehner's tax bill were merely sticking to policies that Boehner and nearly all other GOP leaders have pushed, without reservation, for years: It's always wrong to raise tax rates on anyone, no matter how rich. The nation's big deficit is entirely "a spending problem, not a revenue problem." And in any deficit-reduction plan, spending cuts must overwhelm new revenues, by 10-to-1 if not more.

To be surprised by Boehner's failure is to assume one of two things. Either House conservatives didn't really believe their party's bedrock principles; or they would compromise after seeing President Barack Obama win re-election on a deficit-reduction plan that called for higher taxes on the wealthy.

Neither was true. And now the Republican Party is reeling from unbending fealty to its core principles.

[elleng]

1. 'Congress' structure makes compromise essential,

and the nation once lionized the 19th century senator and congressman Henry Clay as "the Great Compromiser." But the modern Republican Party is heavily energized by the tea party movement, which sees compromise as a triumph of flabby pragmatism over courageous conviction.'

[Wellstone ruled]

2. Say what,the voice of the 1%ers

is calling their minions dysfunctional. Say it isn't so. The POS press is starting to eat it's young. Wow!!!! Must be a really slow news day.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Their policies also led to the economic crisis.....

that the "fiscal cliff" was a response to.

[arendt]

4. This article STILL slams defending SocSec.

Obama has his own problems with unbending liberals who want to protect Social Security, Medicare and other social programs from virtually any cuts. Obama's positions have varied, but he clearly signaled in his 2011 "grand bargain" talks with Boehner that he was willing to slow those programs' growth as part of a deficit-reduction, tax-increase deal.

The propaganda assault on the safety net continues full force.

This is yet another false equivalency - that defending a non-deficit, 80 yr old success is the same as sabotaging the government to get your way.

I am so sick of the media and the corporate Dems and their assault on the middle class.