Archives for January 2023

Signs point to yes:

this is called setting the terms of the public debate and not just naively going into things assuming republicans are operating in good faith https://t.co/ykoDolsSyr

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) January 31, 2023

From the looks of it, President Biden has learned from the past and is, in the American tradition, refusing to negotiate with terrorists (which in a way is bullshit- we negotiate with terrorists all the time and you should talk to the fuckers if you can achieve a good outcome, but there is no reason to engage with the domestic terrorists known as the GOP). There was a good piece in NBC News the other day about this:

In 2011, after faltering debt limit negotiations with House Republicans brought the U.S. to the brink of economic calamity, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden sat by the fireplace in the Oval Office, with their top aides on the couch. While relieved at having narrowly averted disaster, they were stunned by what had transpired.

Obama and Biden made a vow: Never again.

They agreed that going forward, “Nobody can use the threat of default or not increasing the debt limit as a negotiating tool,” said a former Obama official involved in the fiscal discussions, who recounted the Oval Office meeting and the “lesson of 2011” they all discussed. “It made you hold your stomach. You couldn’t believe you were at this situation,” the official said.

The U.S. had just suffered its first credit downgrade. Markets were rattled. Consumer and business confidence was shaken. Stocks took a hit. And the recovery from the Great Recession was in question. Democrats averted the cliff — by acceding to $2 trillion in spending cuts the GOP had demanded after negotiations on a “grand bargain” broke down — but Obama and Biden agreed that the mere threat of default had taken a serious toll.

“They said: This is the sad lesson we’ve learned,” the Obama official said, describing the mood in the room. “It was an unimaginable self-inflicted wound in 2011.”

One of the bigger problems for the current Republican party, beyond their craziness and nihilism and love of violence and their demographic issues, is we have now reached the stage where their bullshit from 2008 to now is not new anymore. The older Democrats and believers in institutions and days gone by, who thought you could negotiate in good faith with these guys, are aging out and retiring. The Hoyer’s and Bayh’s and other folks are no longer in charge, and they have been replace by a new guard. And one of the things about this new guard is that for many of them, much of their political careers and for some, all of it, has been dealing with Republicans who are just utter pieces of shit. Maxwell Frost, the new House Member from Florida, is 25. He was 12 years old during the tea party uprising. He has never known a reasonable Republican party- it’s been nutters his entire career. All he has EVER witnessed is bullshit and bad faith.

And that’s good.

Is Our Democrats Learning?Post + Comments (206)