Karl Rove’s pen pal, Ron Fournier, offers this nonsense up as a reason why Obama should negotiate with Republicans (who could have predicted this would be Fournier’s position):
In April, I wrote that both the White House and the GOP House had incentive to strike a deal that would both raise taxes and trim entitlement spending. The story traced the outlines of such a deal, but the moment was lost. Boehner doesn’t trust Obama and is worried about a revolt from his no-compromise caucus. Obama doesn’t trust Boehner and is worried about a revolt from his no-compromise caucus. The House speaker reportedly raised the idea of a so-called grand bargain at a White House meeting last week, and got laughed at. That is the exact wrong response.
If Obama is going to blink, it should not be over Obamacare. On government debt, however, a little humility and risk in the short-term might earn Obama the nation’s gratitude for generations.
Shorter Ron Fournier- “If Obama fucks with the poors a little bit, the Republicans might not blow up the country and the nation might be happy with Obama.”
Remember when Ron Fournier had his war face on and didn’t want to negotiate with terrorists? Good times:
Last week, we learned that while investigators for the House Oversight Committee were looking into the 2004 death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former NFL player whose story was promoted by the White House before it was revealed that he had been killed by friendly fire, they discovered that top political aide Karl Rove had exchanged emails with the Associated Press’ Ron Fournier on the day the news of Tillman’s death broke.
In one email, Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this?” Fournier responded: “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.”
The one benefit of the internet era is that at least we aren’t wasting ink and paper on hacks like Fournier.
Omnes Omnibus
Won’t someone think of the electrons?
Fournier is a douchecanoe. Water is wet.
David Koch
If they don’t raise the debt ceiling, then no social security checks go out.
It burns the old farts passing the end of their life watching Fixxed News and listening to Hate Radio that a black man is in the White House, but what is really gonna kill them is Boehner’s cat food for seniors pgm.
Villago Delenda Est
Mind you, Tillman hated the war, and hated the malassministration. And Rove was paraphrasing another fucking movie that was one of the shitty grade Z movie star’s favorites, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which aforementioned shitty grade Z movie star imagined was based totally, down to every syllable of dialog, on fact.
Arclite
WTF??! The Dems are the only ones compromising.
Oh, yeah, “BOTH SIDES DO IT!”
Baud
Yes, because of all the shit Obama has dealt with, this is what keeps him awake at night.
Hill Dweller
Jonathan Bernstein does a good job knocking this nonsense down. Here is the conclusion:
Check out the entire piece.
Patrick
Obama’s no-compromise caucus? Does Fournier work for FoxNews or something? Where the hell was Fournier during the 2011 shutdown battle? Obama et al compromised too much.
Furthermore, the reason Boehner got laughed at was that they had played this game before and Boehner had promised a grand bargain only to be overruled by his own tea party.
I don’t take people like Fournier, Mark Halperin any more seriously than anybody at FoxNews. They are all GOP spokespeople with an obvious agenda.
MattF
The ‘a little humility and risk’ insinuation is a tell– Obama is arrogant and cowardly. And Republicans, needless to say, are just doing their duty.
piratedan
and if Obama is “courageous” enough to do as Ron asks, what happens in six weeks when the GOP decides to take the country hostage again for the sake of dismembering the EPA or FEMA?
Ron?
Ron?
NotMax
The eternal right-wing ‘pundit’ forecast:
Cloudy, with chance of a-holes.
Omnes Omnibus
@piratedan: Then he will need to be brave and compromise again. Duh.
BGinCHI
I disagree.
We should be dousing him in ink and rolling him in paper at every opportunity.
The meth demands it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patrick:
Basically, these guys are sending in copy via a T3 direct from the Spock-with-a-beard universe.
srv
@Villago Delenda Est:
Well, that is an under-rated movie for anti-heroism. I don’t know how those debbie-downers got made back then. It’s almost as anti-American as Morituri, which should have gotten Marlon and Yul blacklisted as America haters.
David Koch
If you didn’t know Fournier has been insisting the penny-ante IRS kerfuffle is really a huge scandal that leads to the White House.
He’s pure scum.
Howard Beale IV
Hopefully Bezos will make Fournier work in one of his warehouses during the summer.
Patrick
So the next time we have a Republican President and a Democratic House, I assume Fournier is just fine with Democrats making terroristic demands.
How about the Democrats shut down the government until the Republican President agrees to singly payer health care…
The Republican President better agree. As Fournier himself stated “a little humility and risk in the short-term might earn the Republican President the nation’s gratitude for generations”.
Kay
Laughable. The “GOP House” will never raise taxes.
Why is it people like him only expend energy on “trimming entitlements”? There’s a lot of big issues: immigration, climate change, etc. Why is the Media Celebrity Compromise Caucus always focused like a laser on “entitlements”? That just happens to be their single issue. Weird.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
My guess: They can sound like steely-eyed realists but never be personally affected.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay:
Because they need to focus on 1500 buck a month payments to grandma, not billions in giveaways to our parasite Galtian overlords. Not to mention the entitlement of their children to carry on the family courtier business.
MattF
@Kay: Particularly since actual Republican politicians have been slowly edging away from ‘entitlement reform’ because the Republican base continues to age one year per year– and doesn’t want to hear that Social Security and Medicare are both entitlements. So, when Rick Perry said in 2012 that Social Security was a ‘Ponzi scheme,’ he didn’t get a very positive reception.
Reducing food stamps and ‘welfare’, of course are fine.
Bill Arnold
A “deal” is not possible unless the debt ceiling law is repealed, AND the house agrees to fund the government for the next year, preferably at pre-sequester levels. That needs to be the Republican opening position, with additional sweeteners ready. Otherwise, the Republicans will continue shaking down Obama for his (our) lunch money ever month or two, and maybe breaking other stuff. That Republicans don’t see this is a deficiency in their thinking, and in their mental model of Obama.
Cornerstone would say otherwise. Fine. We shall see.
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: actually no. It’s because they attend Pete Petersens thought leadership training.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
So, so sick of it. Just that tone.
That’s true for immigration and certainly climate change. He should lecture on those. It’s funny how it’s always the same general theme, over decades. When Clinton was President they wouldn’t shut up about cutting welfare. “Bipartisanship” is an oddly narrow belief system.
Eric U.
one of the reasons I was so badly blindsided by Bush the lessor’s administration was that I always liked Cheney for his seeming determination to cut military funding under GHW Bush’s administration. I think the theory that he lost too many brain cells to heart disease has merit. Cutting money from the poors doesn’t really affect the budget in a significant way, you have to cut the middle class or defense. And if you could cut debt service by not buying so many warships, that would be nice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Eric U.: Cheney was at the heart of the farm out functions to contractors movement. His interest in cutting military spending was really an interest in moving that money into the private sector.
JPL
@David Koch: Technically only some of the checks would bounce. Probably all of those who are scheduled to receive payment from the twentieth or so on. Plus it’s Obama’s fault because he could have pick and choose which bills to pay with no money.
Trollhattan
@Eric U.:
You probably mean this Cheney edition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I&feature=player_embedded
Yeah, whatever happened to that guy?
MattF
@Eric U.: A lot of people have wondered about Cheney. My theory is that his years as Halliburton CEO turned him to the dark side.
Kay
@MattF:
I had some glimmers of hope because they had that embarrassing incident where they realized they were all parroting a bogus study and then they couldn’t ignore income inequality anymore because it’s to the point where you’d have to be godamned blind not to see it, and INCREDIBLY they’re going in the wrong direction again! They’re lobbying for increased inequality of income!
Why is this so hard for them? Stop taking money from BELOW and sending it UP. Stop digging.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Think of them as being as clueless about working people as the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey but uncaring as well.
RaflW
@Patrick: In the realm of reporters that are more than useless, lets add CBS’s Mark Knoller
What an asshat. The Dems do not oppose the FDA bill, in any meaningful sense of that phrase. The Dems oppose a piecemeal approach to adding back popular gov’t functions, thereby setting up a global equivalent to the House’s bullshit split of the Farm Bill and SNAP, wherein the poors get nothing and things people like get 95% (aka sequestered).
Mark, dear, Democrats remember how they got rolled on the FAA and the sequester. That you don’t seems to indicate that either you’re loosing your mental faculties, or you’re hopelessly biased.
Patrick
Mark Knoller must think his viewers are pretty stupid…
So, I assume Knoller must be just fine with Dems doing the same thing when we have a GOP President, ie shutting down the government and ONLY propose opening things Dems want open.
Not a great way of running a government Mr Knoller…
Citizen Alan
@MattF:
Dick Cheney was fucking BORN on the dark side.
SFAW
Translation: fuckin’ uppity nigras, thinkin’ they be almost as good as us’n.
Kay
@SFAW:
The whole “saving face” thing is weird. It’s so insular and coddling. They really look pained and concerned when they say it: John Boehner has to SAVE FACE. We have to HELP HIM get to YES.
Why? If he did something stupid shouldn’t he be humiliated? That’s what happens to everyone else. He’ll be okay.
SFAW
@Kay:
Now, don’t be goin’ all rational an’ shit, OK? ‘Cause the Rethugs ain’t nothin’ if not irrational.
drkrick
@Citizen Alan:
Pretty much. He was the only vote in the House against calling for Nelson Mandela’s release before the heart attacks started. John Perry Barlow was a GOP mucky-muck in Wyoming in the ’80’s and has said the Cheney he worked with then and the guy he reads about now are very different, but the before version was still no treat.
WereBear
Maybe a cause ‘n’ effect thing going on there.
And the reason the evil walk among us for so very long is that they fear death like you would not believe. Deep down, they believe in hell; religious, or not.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: “Entitlements” is a useful word because it actually means “Social Security and Medicare,” but people don’t generally realize it means that; it sounds like it means “handouts to welfare cheats” or something.
Republicans and Very Serious People can always accuse Democrats of not getting serious about entitlements, in the hope that someday they might actually take the bait and can then be bashed for cutting Social Security.
BruceFromOhio
When a parent stands over the three-yr-old lying on her/his back in the middle of the kitchen floor, screaming and pummeling the floor with his/her little fists, the last thing you do is fucking blink.
Ain’t nobody gonna blink, DOUCHEBAG.
Bex
@Omnes Omnibus: “Tell me dear, what is a weekend?”
mclaren
Do we even have to dignify Fournier’s drivel with a response?
I’d suggest somebody lynch the son of a bitch, but that would defame the hangman’s noose too greatly.