Blinded By The Beltway

Listening to beltway insiders like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan enlighten us with their punditry this morning on Morning Joke™ after the speech by President Obama yesterday, it reminded me once again that what we've heard before is not necessarily old news. What Joe and Crankypants failed to realize is that the President's address wasn't meant for political junkies or armchair pundits. It was meant for the 99% of Americans who don't watch cable news. I know, because I used to be one of them.

It's been a long time since I've been pissed off that the President of the United States would dare preempt whatever garbage I was watching for something in which I wasn't interested. But I still remember that feeling. Sort of the same feeling I got when John Boehner spoke after the President in a feeble attempt to exude some kind of equal footing with the President, with an assist by the mainstream media. They're not equal by any means. When in the history of presidential addresses on television has that ever happened, save for rebuttals to the State of the Union, which if I recall is also a recent phenomenon?

Scarborough then smirked about President Obama asking the American public, the people he was addressing, to contact their local Congressman if they felt a balanced approach with tax revenue increases was the way to go. Scarborough scoffed that it didn't work. I'm assuming he was getting his beauty sleep for his early morning monkey dance and no one briefed him on the fact that House website servers crashed from the response.

President Obama is taking the case to the American people. Poll after poll shows their preference of a plan with spending cuts and revenue increases and that's advantageous for the White House. But the beltway pundits are so far inside their own asses, they can't see what good the President's address did. That's because they're blinded by their own awesomeness and all they were thinking about was the current political boxing match and what only they thought of last evening's proceedings. Having an opinion is one thing, but completely failing to be objective is another matter.

Quote of the Day

People like me don’t say that the Ryan plan is too radical; we say that it’s a fraud. The spending cuts are largely fake, either because they’re just magic asterisks or because they wouldn’t survive politically; the revenue estimates are fake, because they combine huge tax cuts with vague assurances that extra revenue will be found by closing loopholes. There’s no there there — except for big tax cuts for the rich and pain for the poor.

All I can think here is that reporters are so deep into the Beltway conventional wisdom that this is a Bold, Serious Plan that they just tune out the people saying that no, it’s not.

~Paul Krugman on non-serious reporting on the Paul Ryan budget plan