◼ Obama goes to war. His motto: “We have met the enemy and it is you, the Republicans.” - Bookworm Room
The Wall Street Journal has penned what may be the most savage editorial opinion I’ve ever seen in those pages. The sentiments aren’t knew, but the blood-drawing is:
◼ There really has never been anything like this in the White House, at least not in the modern era.
Ronald Reagan compromised on budget issues with a Democratic majority rather than trigger a debt limit crisis. George H.W. Bush signed onto a tax increase in 1990 in part so he could get Democratic support for the brewing Gulf War. Bill Clinton struck a budget deal and worked with Republicans on foreign policy. And facing a new Democratic majority in 2007, George W. Bush signed onto a fiscal "stimulus" and rotten energy bill well before the financial crisis compelled bipartisan votes.
Mr. Obama declares that he won't even deign to negotiate over an extension of the debt limit, which expires within a month or two. And he carpet-bombs Republicans only two weeks after House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor took a political risk and declared they'd vote for the President's Syrian war resolution against the views of most of their own Members.
The evidence suggests that Mr. Obama wants a showdown with Congress that ends with a government shutdown or a dance with default. He can then mount an offensive against Republicans that will rally his base, which soured on his Syrian plans and vetoed Larry Summers for the Federal Reserve. With his domestic agenda dead on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama may also figure that stigmatizing Republicans over a shutdown-default crisis is the only way that Democrats can retake the House in 2014.
The question is how well all of this will play with a war-weary public.
◼ Conservatives, Your President Hates You - Keith Koffler/White House Dossier
...he’s just another liberal POLITICIAN who harbors the standard, stereotypical, unintellectual view of conservatives as dumb morons motivated by ill will toward their fellow man, and certainly, fellow woman.
And so, even as the wounded and dead were being accounted for following a mass shooting Monday morning a couple of miles away, Obama couldn’t live the with prospect of having to delay sinking his teeth into his conservative opponents. He’d spent weeks being nice as he courted their support for his Syria bombing campaign. I mean, enough was enough....
