Now The Claim They Didn't Know
What a bunch of liars! Everybody with the discerning capacity of a gnat knew that the Debt Deal was a loser, and that the triggers and targets and sequestrations would all result in only one thing: Massive defense cuts while the Obama spending machine chugs along. Now that it has come to pass, some House Republicans are now expressing “buyers’ remorse.” My suggestion to these simpering would-be Republican leaders is that if they think they now feel badly about the way this has turned out, just imagine their poor voters. These members of Congress who were elected precisely to stand firm on this issue should understand something more: If they think they’re feeling buyers’ remorse, they should see how their voters feel about having elected them. They feel badly? Not badly enough!
This foolishness is their way of trying to repair bridges to voters, particularly the Tea Party, but I think it’s pathetic and will not work. I think the voters who elected these members, all of them, should remember that these are the people who sold us out to Barack Obama on the basis that they needed to do so in order to save their own electoral skin. As I discussed at the time of the “deal,” the entire episode was a display of sickening surrender by House Republicans, whipped into submission by a weak Republican leadership that is more willing to discipline its own members than to fight the leftist front.
Cowardice was the approach of the time, and it was all about their unwillingness to do the hard work of leadership. It is this same troop of alleged “stalwarts” who shafted Newt Gingrich in 1995 over the government shutdown, as they went with Dole rather than Gingrich. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is who the whiners in our House leadership is comprised of today. Nobody on the conservative side of this argument should forget that these folks had a chance to stand up to the Republican leadership, and to stand against Obama and the Senate, in order to stave off this growing disaster.
Our military is now bearing the vast majority of the cuts under the auspices of this programmed sequestration and now we see Congressmen from defense-heavy districts complaining, after having voted for this pig in a poke. They took what they thought was the easy way out politically, to try to safeguard their own necks, all because they were unwilling to fight. To suggest that we need new leadership in the House of Representatives is to undersell the point: We need new leadership everywhere among the Republicans, in the House, the Senate, and in committees.
Consider the case of Buck McKeon(R-CA), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He backed the deal, and helped round up the freshmen members, and pushed them to support this plan, yet now he complains bitterly that the deal is no damned good. Interviewed for The Hill article, he said:
“I voted for it because I was told the supercommittee couldn’t fail, because sequestration was so bad that they would have to come together on that,” McKeon said. “Well, obviously it didn’t work, so now we find ourselves in a very difficult situation.
“Can I go back knowing what I know now, and change my vote then? We don’t get that luxury around here.”
This is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee complaining that if he knew then what he knows now, he’d have changed his vote. If Buck McKeon were in easy shouting distance of me, I’d point out to this bonehead that THE ENTIRE CONSERVATIVE BASE OF THE PARTY KNEW, and was telling he and the Speaker, and the Majority leader all of this in no uncertain terms. What sort of dismally bankrupt logic permits this man to now pretend that he didn’t know. He’s lying! He did know! They ALL knew! The rare few members whose arms they could not twist certainly knew. The members who they cajoled and prodded into joining them in surrender knew.
What then is this business about not knowing then what he knows now? Somebody who lives in Chairman McKeon’s district should please let him know I’m calling him out on all of this. I may be nobody, but even this nobody knew! Obviously, the Tea Party in his home district must be making a fuss, otherwise this useless whiner wouldn’t be out in the media whining about not having known how this would go. How can any serious leader in the GOP claim not to have known? The answer is that there are not now many serious leaders in the GOP in the House, so if the truth would be told, every last one of them who has been there over three terms should be bounced out of town on their asses at the next possible electoral opportunity.
Forgive me please, ladies and gentlemen, for becoming a bit hacked-off about all of this. It’s unconscionable that the leadership of the Republican party in the House of Representatives would tell us with a straight face, and plenty of simpering, that they hadn’t known. Boehner needs to go. Cantor needs to go. McKeon and every other one like him needs to go. I think we should question the sincerity of any member of the House, never mind the leadership, who claims that he or she hadn’t known. In fact, I’m certain of it. We told them. We demanded Cut, Cap and Balance, and while it passed the House, it was already being undercut by the Speaker’s own negotiations. No sir, they all knew. All of them.
