Mondays are always a bit difficult. But coming back to dealing with the ineptitude of our broken political system was doubly difficult after an amazing weekend of music. But deal we must, and who better to help navigate through the troubled waters than our favorite Congressman Alan Grayson?
He led the charge from the House against President Obama’s horrific budget proposal to cut Social Security benefits with chained CPI and higher rates for Medicare beneficiaries by writing a letter and helping to gather 2.3 million signatures on petitions, delivered to the White House last week.
As for the Fools on the Hill, they were out in force on the Sunday shows yesterday. As she does every Monday morning, Crooks and Liars‘ Nicole Belle joined me to recap the madness, which ventured deep into opposite world territory this week:
Every Sunday the C&L team watches our various assigned shows and tries to find those moments that frame the debate, expose the ridiculous or corrupt or just flat out dumbfounds us. We chat with each other through the shows so that we know what everyone is doing and to occasionally get reassurance that we’re not nuts and some politician or pundit actually did say what we thought they said.
This Sunday, there was a repeated phrase the C&L team used with one another when planning out our posts: ‘What world do these people live on?’ I’m not really sure myself, after watching this bits on the Sunday shows.
For example, Fareed Zakaria wanted all of us to know that Margaret Thatcher’s policies have been vindicated. Really? Well, maybe for those of us who enjoy a cushy editorial position at Newsweek, a weekly news show on cable, a directorship at the Council of Foreign Relations and regularly attend Davos conferences. I’m sure that to them, the economy seems great. Now for the rest of us, we understand that it was Thatcher’s policies (as employed here in the US by Ronald Reagan) that marked the beginning of the end.
Marco Rubio—who actually appeared on not one or two but SEVEN shows this Sunday—told David Gregory that the GOP is not ‘the party of the people who have made it.’ Amazingly, they both kept a straight face through it.
Speaking of keeping a straight face, see if you can do it when you hear George Will insist that conservatism begins with ‘facing the facts’. No, really.
David Brooks tried to pretend that the NRCC chair’s attack on the Obama budget isn’t just part of a long line of obstruction. And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you…
UP with Steve Kornacki made its premiere this weekend and to make sure that it got off to an auspicious start, they booked Mattie Duppler of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Duppler filibustered the discussion as only conservatives can, but when she claimed that the Obama administration had not shrunk the size of government and cut spending, Rep. Jerry Nadler had enough, calling it the ‘central lie of our political debate right now’.