Can we take a
moment to pull back the curtain?
Today is the
day when the trigger is pulled for sequestration. On February 19th
our perfumed potentate stood in front of first responders to inform the nation
that across-the-board cuts would be calamitous if sequestration takes effect.
Beginning with
his February 19th gloom and doom speech we heard how deep “spending cuts” would
affect programs in every state only to have his ploy to scare the hell out
of every American roundly criticized on the Left and Right.
Once the
Republicans began reminding us that sequestration was the president’s “solution”
for budget cuts, the West Wing vehemently denied that fact. Enter a voice from the past: the man who took
down a president.
“The
finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate on Oct. 22, when
President Barack Obama blamed Congress. ‘The sequester is not something that
I've proposed," Obama said. "It is something that Congress has
proposed.’"
“The White
House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during
the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two
days later.”
"’There
was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some
automatic trigger,’ Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It ‘was very much
rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic
measure.’"
“The president
and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book ‘The Price of Politics’ shows the automatic spending cuts were
initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House
congressional relations chief Rob Nabors—probably the foremost experts on
budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.”
“Obama personally
approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011,
according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly
involved.”
“Nabors has
told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A
mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise.
Nabors has said, ‘We didn't actually think it would be that hard to convince
them’—Reid and the Republicans—to adopt the sequester. ‘It really was the only
thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.’"
Then he
asserted the unthinkable and unforgivable when he wrote, “So when the
president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending
cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the
goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a
strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.”
[Emphasis mine]
Now the White
House is trying to destroy the Pulitzer Prize winning author. The West Wing is in panic mode worried sick
that Woodward’s charge “that
the emperor has no clothes” may encourage others to finally begin to do the
same.
“The rules may
be different for Barack Obama, and there’s good reason to believe his charmed
existence—in which he is never held accountable for any disaster or lie—may
continue. But eventually even he may find himself subject to the laws of
political gravity. It could be that by blithely assuming that the public will
always back him against the Republicans, he is setting himself—and the
country—up for a great fall as we head back to the brink on the budget.”
On January 19,
2013, Australian author Hal G. P. Colebatch wrote “His Queeg
Moment” about our president. I
believe after re-reading it that is it an accurate metaphor.
“In fact Queeg
is not insane, at least not at that time. He is simply grappling, more and more
disastrously, with a job too big for him. Come the crisis of a typhoon, he
becomes paralyzed and nearly sinks the ship by failing to give the obvious
orders. At the subsequent court-martial he appears quite normal until he breaks down under the
pressure of cross-examination. Before this, the officers have searched the
regulations for guidance, but the regulations refer only to a captain who is
clearly and unmistakably insane, not one who is merely guilty of eccentricity
and bad judgment. At a lower level of responsibility, Queeg might have
performed adequately, but with Keefer’s question, the remaining respect for
Queeg’s office has gone.”
“Obama’s
second inauguration speech may be his Queeg moment—an undeniable demonstration
that, in an emergency, he is incapable of grappling with reality. For all his
unceasing invocation of the word “change,” the outstanding thing about Obama
has been his apparent inability to react, even to an imminent crisis.”
[SNIP]
“Faced with
the worst looming fiscal cliff-fall in world history Obama, like Queeg in the
typhoon, has done nothing at all, but has, increasingly, resorted to
meaningless words. His pseudo-Keynesian fiscal notions and a mantra-like
repetition of old and failed ideas, suggest a serious lack of mental
versatility.”
[SNIP]
“The dancing
is still there, the golf, the celebs, the multi-million dollar holidays, but
behind them it is possible to detect a desperate emptiness, a interconnected
mosaic of failure.”
It is
important to point out that the Navy initially objected to The Caine
Mutiny’s depiction of a mentally unbalanced man as the captain of one of its
ships and the word "mutiny" in the film's title. The epigraph which followed the opening
credits informed the audience, "There has never been a mutiny in a ship of
the United States Navy. The truths of this film lie not in its incidents, but
in the way a few men meet the crisis of their lives."
So as America
struggles to meet the crisis of its existence, created by a newer version of
Captain Queeg, the mainstream media allows his disingenuous arguments to go
unchallenged and chooses instead to devour Bob Woodward.
