I get really tired of the kind of false equivalency game being played by Cokie Roberts here. It's one we see constantly by our Villagers in the media who are always desperate to paint the liberal base of the Democratic party as being "extremists." Republicans are pushing for horrible draconian cuts to the budget that are going to weaken our economy, which Roberts admits is overreaching and it's going to potentially harm them politically, but then she just has to get the "both sides do it" line in there.
Sorry Cokie but one side governing like Republican-lite and catering to big business but actually caring about governing is not equal to the other side which just wants to burn the house down. She pretty well makes that point herself since she doesn't cite a single example of this supposed overreach by the Democrats. The only ones she gives are examples of what the Republicans have done.
And I don't know of anyone who cares whether politicians are "getting along" or not, if "getting along" means doing harm to the working class. It seems the only bipartisanship we've been getting out of Washington DC lately is the kind that helps the rich at the expense of the poor and what's left of our middle class.
TAPPER: And Jon makes a salient point in that amusing spot, which is that most of the budget is not being debated right now, George.
WILL: It's not being debated because they say we're only going to debate discretionary spending. We should...
ROBERTS: Domestic discretionary spending.
WILL: We should ban that word. It's all discretionary, other than interest on the national debt. Social Security is discretionary. We have the discretion to change the law. Same is true with Medicare and Medicaid.
ROBERTS: But -- but -- the -- you know, they don't, because they're scared to. And what it requires is everybody holding hands and jumping at once. And there's not a lot of hand-holding and Kumbaya singing on Capitol Hill, so I don't think that you're going to see that happening. But this fight I do think is going to be very interesting to see how it works out for Republicans next year.
TAPPER: You think there might be overreaching?
ROBERTS: Absolutely. And it happens with both parties. They do it all the time. They come into power and they think the voters have told them something different from what the voters have actually told them.
The voters say, "We want you just to do something, stop bickering, get along, and pay us -- you know, run the country." And instead, they do things like, say, "We're going tell the EPA not to have any power over greenhouse gases." You know, that's overreaching. "We're going to cut Head Start." These people have never run on a record. They're going to have to next year go out and run on a record. And they're going to have trouble with that.
KARL: You know, they did run on a promise to deal with this. And Paul Ryan is about to come out with a budget. Next month, he's going to come out with a budget that is going to address Medicare. And a lot of the Republican leadership up on the Hill thinks this is a terrible mistake, that he is driving them off a cliff to do this before the White House goes first or at least goes with him.
But Ryan is charging ahead. And it will be very interesting to see how this plays. But he is -- you know, he has somebody who has consistently promised to do this. He did it on his own, before he was chairman of the Budget Committee, when he was in the minority, he had only 13 co-sponsors of his bill. Now he's doing it on behalf of the Republican leadership.
