Moment of Truth

[kentuck]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/moment-of-truth_b_470870.html

<snip>
March 2010 will either be remembered as the month when the scales fell from Barack Obama's eyes and he realized that the bipartisan fantasy, given the current Republican Party, is a fool's errand. Or it will go down in history as the moment when Obama had a chance to change course and emerge as a leader -- and flinched. Which will it be?

<snip>
Bipartisanship was also the word du jour when the president announced his fiscal commission. Everything is supposedly on the table. Yet no Republican seems willing to raise taxes. And no Democrat worthy of the name would sacrifice Social Security. If we had the nerve to restore progressive taxation in this country, we could have our fiscal balance and our social investment, too. No bipartisanship there.

When Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chair, was in the Senate, privatization of Social Security was one of his big causes. Under the commission's rules, it will take 14 out of 18 votes to recommend a blueprint for budget reduction. I asked a senior member of Obama's economic team how they expected a commission to reach agreement with this kind of requirement, given that Republicans block all Senate action using a much more modest supermajority. He had no good answer.

Yet the narrative of the day, articulated by Evan Bayh, Pete Peterson, and repeated by one journalist and pundit after another, is that "Washington" has become "dysfunctional." Sen. Bayh's recent op-ed in the New York Times is enough to make you vomit.

<snip>
There is nothing dysfunctional about "Washington." The Republicans have simply decided to use the filibuster to block anything that President Obama proposes, and the president, thus far, hasn't quite mustered the nerve to take them on.

As John Podesta puts it, we have a kind of perverted parliamentary system, in which the opposition party has the power to block, but the governing party doesn't have the power to govern. Kind of like Italy before it got a quasi-dictator, or France during the Fourth Republic.

Or the kind of failed states where nobody governs, and power reverts to tribes, mobs, and warlords (or in our case, to Wall Street.)

.........more

[MannyGoldstein]

1. March 2010 Will Go Down In History As

another $ Trillion or so of our tax dollars pledged by the Obama administration to back junk assets, so that banks can continue to gamble unfettered.

[handmade34]

2. funny how Washington

suddenly became dysfunctional when a black man was elected president

[Skittles]

3. he'll flinch

[kentuck]

4. The comments are very good...

:-)