All Due Respect To A Lot of Good People - Bullshit

[Cosmocat]

First, to get this out of the way.

I like this President A LOT. These situations are one of my few issues with him.

I have defended ACA REPEATEDLY here, and have not backed down.

He absolutely got as much as he could with it, and frankly, it is an achievement to have gotten ANYTHING done.

I support his reasoned hawkishness on international policy, and have repeatedly attacked this meme about him being soft or weak or whatever it is that he gets framed.

That said, this whole, "he played three dimensional poker!" thing in this situation is bullshit.

Barack Obama is a politician, but he is not a guy who operates with deviousness.

Sorry, he did not put his offer on the table without being willing to have it accepted.

He might have had a good idea they would not be able to get it done, but the idea that he put this offer on the table playing the odds that they would not be able to get it passed flies in the face of his trying to avoid the "cliff."

He isn't playing chicken with these clowns or with the country.

Further, this thing about "making them look unreasonable."

Republicans have been raging jackasses for two decades now.

They were in the 90s, they were before and even worse post 9-11, and somehow they become exponentially worse after this President got elected.

WE know they are jackasses, and enough of the soft "middle" know it that 52% of this country has had the good sense to elect and re-elect Barack Obama.

The minutia of them not getting their clowns to vote for this thing is not going to be the monumental event that charges some electrical action in the cerebral cortex of people who have not been able to get it after two decades of ass holery.

Last night, MSNBC was all over this.
Faux completely ignored it.
CNN had stuff about Newton.

Sadly, the republicans finding a way to out douchbag themselves is a big victory for US, the left leaning, geek, follow this stuff types.

The rest of the country just simply is not tuned into this like we are.

The poker analogy is this.

The President had a full house, he played it like a Queen high, and the jackass who had the 2-7 hammer threw his cards up in the air and kicked the table over.

[sabrina 1]

1. Thanks, it's just ludicrous to believe that he was playing some kind of poker

The whole reason for putting SS on the table was to try to get Republicans to buy the tax policies he wanted to get through. That means he was sincere in that offer and had they accepted the tax policies are we to believe HE would have backed away from his own proposals?

I don't understand why people think that mind-reading is fact. But this whole forum was covered in OPs making this ridiculous claim with more than a few willing to buy into it without a shred of evidence.

People need to face facts. Obama WANTS to give Republicans a gift and he has offered them the one he knows they want the most, SS, three times now. And he still appears to be puzzled about them still referring to him as a 'socialist'. He has worked hard to show them he is a lot like them. But it's more than that imo, as the Dem Party moves more to the Right, they actually do share many of their views and SS is one area where they actually do agree.

The Third Way website demonstrates this point on SS. They claim to be a 'Liberal Think Tank', and a few Dems belong to their organization or whatever it is, but on SS they are no different than the Republicans.

[Cosmocat]

2. Yeah

We are losing ground with each go around with SS, and it just defies any reason.

Pre-SS we had elderly living in complete abject poverty and and dying of starvation.

I have been around enough to know how life looks for a lot of older folks, and a LOT of them have basic, bare bones lives that are supported by their SS checks.

Just such a sad and disturbing disconnect with what people think about the world.

There are those folks who do the behind the basic jobs that are the framework for what everyone else does, hard working, honest and decent people who don't have the benefit of six figure salaries or the capacity to pile money into retirement accounts.

We have been going the wrong direction with it for too long.

[fascisthunter]

8. ^

[lunatica]

3. I've never been called a geek before

I think I'm flattered.

[OneGrassRoot]

5. lol...me, too.

[bloomington-lib]

4. kick

[Doctor_J]

6. Thanks Cosmocat for some reality

This gambit was not some intricate bluff by the president. He had the entire Dem caucus in a panic. He got lucky (as did we) that his offer of cuts was not accepted, and I am willing to bet that he will STILL offer some up before this is over. The real Dems in Congress are going to have to watch him like a hawk or a whole lot of important programs are going to be in jeopardy.

[Buddaman]

7. WTF ever!!!!!

[byeya]

9. If it were a ploy, why did Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson, et al. get so exercised? And, this left

Pelosi in a weakened position because she had to defend Obama's playing fast and loose with SS.

The simplest explanation is usually the best explanation and in this case it's that Obama was willing to sell out Social Security.

[jsr]

10. Occam's razor says n-dim chess is bullshit

Obama's offer was honest.

[John2]

11. President Obama

is looking at short term pain instead of long term pain in this situation. He is not going to get a deal with the other side, because it is incapable of compromising as you saw with the Republican Congressman with Scarborough this morning.


He should know this by now. He should listen to the people that put him in office. As far as people that call me an extremist on the Left, I don't consider myself an extremist. President Obama maybe President, but I don't consider him to be anymore wiser either. I voted for him, because I agreed with him on most issues and not because of his race.

I expect him to stick to what we agreed on. Social Security was not in the Deal. The electorate knew that Fiscal Cliff problem and that Republican obstruction would be there. We knew about the gerrymandering too. The country gave him a mandate. I think the media and people on Wall Street is more afraid of this Fiscal Cliff than everybody else.

With everything that I have seen both Boehner and Obama tried to push, the Sequestrian cuts look better to me. The only thing for the Sequestrian cuts is they need to be tweet. All they need to do is get those taxes extended for the middle class and let the other areas take hold.

Then they can hold talks on what cuts they like to keep and how much each area can be cut with trade offs. They can identify loop holes that needs to close for the wealthy and defense that needs to be cut. The military is too huge period. We are subsidizing too many foreign countries. We do not need bases all over the World. Our Constitution didn't call for none it. I don't think anybody for saw, that we would be paying and training other countries armed forces while placing dictators in place either, to defend against religious extremism. Religious extremism has existed ever since the rise of civilizations. That is why I think what the U.S. is doing is ludicrous. All it did was justify reasons for a huge military build up by our military industry. When people experience enormous power, they can become obsessive with it.

I don't know if anyone remember watching a scene in Generals and Gods, where Chamberlain takes his brother and they look at the enormous power of the Union Army. He explained, what men can do with that power very well. We have the most powerful armed forces the World has ever seen and we have to be very careful how it is used. so how many other groups that have gripes with other groups, will come complaining to us, to intefere? All they have to do is show us the atrocities by the other side in a War. And if religion is involved, we get hooked. The cycle will continue in other places. That is why I'm a big proponent of letting people solve their own problems like the U.S. did in our Wars. Europe went through it also as did Russia or China.

[Cosmocat]

14. Agreed

with most of you posted.

[Doctor_J]

15. Great post John2

Like it or not Obama tried to give away the store this week, and all of us who voted for him had our hopes dashed. Hopefully this near-miss, after all of his debacles during term 1, will make him stop listening to the big shots and start listening to his constituents. I doubt it though.

[Rocky888]

12. Social Security and President Obama

No other aspect of this political made mess blind sided me more than the chained CPI. Even if he felt the need to compromise. Why did he chose the one program that has had no part in adding to our debt? This has made no sense from the beginning, and never will. And the medicare proposal would have been devastating for people like myself that lives in a red state (florida).

This will be a shit stain on his record for the rest of his life, along with all democrats willing to go along with it.

There is one thing that needs to be said: the payroll tax holiday needs to end. That is for our future of social security, and every month it is not deducted, it is adding to it's early demise.

[Cosmocat]

13. AGEED

He campaigned on returning rates to the Clinton level's for the top 5 percent and that SS would not be touched.

He campaigned on it, and got reelected on it.

That is what America wanted.

And, absolutely, if something needs to be done with medicade NOW, but SS should not even be a part of debt discussions.

Something needs to be done for long term viability, but it funded for friggen decades.