Friday, February 25, 2011

Democrats Preparing to Surrender Again?

As BTD over at TalkLeft points out, it appears that the Democrats are once again preparing to surrender as they begin negotiations with themselves. As I have pointed out before, Obama started us down this road by surrendering to the Republican framing that cutting the deficit, not job creation or stimulating the economy, should be the top priority. Then, by surrendering on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, he insured that the only way to reduce the deficit would be to cut the budget. Then came his $41 billion dollar budget cut proposal. Of course that was not enough for the Republicans, who are basically fighting among themselves about how high to cut, and the number just keeps going up.
So, like the sun rising in the morning the Dems now prepare to surrender:
With a political standoff over spending threatening to trigger a federal shutdown next week, Senate Democrats began drafting a plan Thursday to slice billions of dollars from domestic agency budgets over the next seven months, yielding to Republican demands to reduce the size of government this year.
Of course this just signals to the Republicans that they should stick to their guns since the Democrats won't:
"It sounds like Senate Democrats are making progress towards our goal of cutting government spending to help the private sector create jobs," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). "Hopefully, that means they will support the [bill] with spending cuts that we will pass next week, rather than shutting down the government."
Who would have thought it, the Dems offer a compromise and the Republican response is "great, now just give us everything we want."
Of course that is what they will do. Obama made it clear back in December when he made his infamous hostage taking analogy in talking about his decision to fold on the tax cuts for the rich.
“I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”

Of course, once you say this the hostage takers will always threaten to hurt the hostage, why wouldn't they. At this point the totally inability of the Democrats, both the President and those in Congress, to stand their ground is as infuriating as it is, at this point, predictable.

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