Monday, November 21, 2011

Erskine Bowles doesn't feel the love - Via Jennifer Rubin's blog at the WashPost, the former co-chair of the first debt commission all but accuses Obama of abandoning the commission's recommendations so he could play his "sensible guy" schtick.

5 comments:

This again? said...

Yeah, that's rough on Erskine "Irritated" Bowles.

You know who else abandoned the commission's recommendations? The commission.

The recommendations failed by 3 votes. Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling and Dave Camp snuffed the report by voting no. Those three Republican Congressmen must have been possessed by the bill-killing specter of Barack Obama, who is of course solely to blame.

Let we forget said...

And four Democrats voted against it, so they're 33% more culpable.

But so what if the commission didn't have a "formal" recommendation? Obama could have pushed forward with his filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress and done something to cut the deficit. But then I guess that superpower is reserved for popular mandates like Obamacare.

Lest's get serious said...

Why didn't Obama antagonize his supermajority to push through a non-binding package that he and his party opposed? Phew, that's a toughie.

Answer: Because the President didn't want to. And thanks to his friends the Republicans, he didn't have to.

Paul Ryan, the fast-rising fiscal seer of his party, killed the recommendations... but now Obama's being trashed by Republicans for not pushing through the plan that Ryan & Co. rejected. So here's a question for you: WTF?

Eric said...

Well, I'll ask this: after three years of far-and-away record deficits and increasing the national debt by 40%, what happened to that guy who stood on the Senate floor voted against raising the debt ceiling because it represented a "failure of leadership."

WTF indeed.

Anonymous said...

But how much of that debt is Obama-generated? And how much did he inherit? Most important of all, how do we stop the majority of Americans who continue to recognize the difference from voting in 2012?