Happy In Their Ignorance
by Steve
GOP senator Tom Coburn, who unfortunately has credibility with Barack Obama, will be introducing his own plan to cut $9 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years. Because Coburn is considered to be a "serious person" when in fact he espouses right wing crap all the time, I'm sure some of what he says today will be taken seriously, even though it will be slanted way too much towards making the bottom 98% pay for the ongoing party by the Top 2%.
There was a story over the weekend, which I can't find at the moment, that indicated how uneducated the 2010 House GOP freshmen class really is about the government they've set out to destroy. In their growing rage that they'll be thwarted in their efforts to strangle the federal government to please Big Oil and the Koch brothers, dozens of them apparently asked if it was possible to simply strip $5 trillion in spending over the next two years. It seems that these "policymakers" didn't know the entire federal budget was only about $3.5 trillion a year - or maybe they did and couldn't care.
Nonetheless, GOP elders must be taking note of what their raging children are doing to their brand name. A new CBS News poll out this morning shows that 71% of those polled disapprove of congressional Republicans' performance in the debt ceiling debate. The 21% who do approve reflects George W. Bush's stalwart base during his 8 years. That number reflects the hard right extremist fringe of our politics, the GOP's base. What Newt Gingrich unleashed upon this country nearly two decades ago has now manifested itself like a cancer in the base of one of our two political parties, and yet the media cannot bring itself to treat this malignancy for what it is, or to ask serious questions of "serious people" like Tom Coburn today when he seeks the cameras like a moth to the light.