'Boehnerquester,' not 'Obamaquester'

House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor pose with members of Congress and 'Obamaquester' props, 10 days before the sequester is scheduled by law to be automatically triggered.

By Emily Theroux

The Wall Street Journal called him “President Armageddon.”

Early in the final fortnight of the Great Sequestration Debate, President Obama compared a frightening cascade of looming federal spending cuts to taking a “meat cleaver approach” to our fragile economic recovery.

Unless an unlikely compromise between Democrats and Republicans can be reached, the first round of a decade’s worth of automatic, across-the-board reductions will kick in on March 1, whacking an immediate $85 billion from military and domestic budgets alike. Countless jobs will be lost, Obama warned, and many more public-sector employees can expect reduced hours or extended furloughs (including teachers, first responders, air traffic controllers, and FBI agents).

But unlike the sojourns of their elected representatives, who just embarked on yet another paid leave, these government “vacations” won’t be taxpayer-funded.

“Brutal,” as the president described it, doesn’t fully capture the coming desperation, once funding has been curtailed for everything from submarine deployments to military health care coverage; from nuclear weapons security and foreign aid to FDA meat, poultry, and dairy inspections; from the Head Start program and immunization programs to food assistance for impoverished children.

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For weeks now, House Speaker John Boehner has blithely called the cruel, indiscriminate cutback plan “the Obamaquester.” The Republican talking point has become a Twitter hashtag wildly popular on the right. Liberals have their own terms for it, many of them unprintable. Some call it “the axe”; I call it “the guillotine.” A particularly creative response to Boehner’s taunt — Sequestageddon™ — was posted last night on Twitter by a freelance writer and self-avowed “political junkie” who tweets as @DAbitty.

Like the Debt Ceiling Debacle and the Fiscal Cliff Fiasco before it, the Sequester Stalemate is abstract and unfathomable to many Americans who don’t pay much attention to the “meat-grinding” of the legislative process. What makes these partisan showdowns all the more toxic is the way Boehner, McConnell, and other GOP leaders evade liability — for both plutocratic policy goals and relentless obstruction — by using convoluted language, trafficking in logical fallacies, and fomenting deliberate lies about their opponents.

Ironically, the sequester was intended to be so dire a threat that neither side would consider actually letting it happen. Yet here we stand on the brink of economic disaster with no hint of a compromise in sight, and all the obdurate Republicans will do is try their damnedest to make sure the blame falls squarely on President Obama’s shoulders.

While reporters from The New York Times, The Hill, and other mainstream publications reproach both political parties for the impasse, the GOP has staunchly refused to counterbalance the sequester’s spending cuts with revenue increases. Emboldened by Bob Woodward’s book The Price of Politics, Republicans almost universally ascribe the resulting gridlock to Obama. (Woodward credited then-Chief-of-Staff Jack Lew with initially proposing the sheer lunacy of including mandatory sequestration in the 2011 debt deal.)
Slate.com’s Dave Weigel, who called the question of which side really dreamed up the sequester “the dumbest debate in Washington,” slyly noted Woodward’s version as the one Republicans “prefer to cite” (while they omit another Woodward observation: the sequester’s package of spending cuts with no tax hikes was what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “demanded”).

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A slide from the final page of Speaker John Boehner's PowerPoint to House Republicans on July 31, 2011, obtained by The Daily Beast.

Boehner’s malevolently quixotic “Obamaquest” (to pin the tail on the Dems’ donkey for any fallout from another GOP stab at tanking the economy) may yet crash and burn. Yesterday, a 2011 email surfaced that included a PowerPoint presentation developed by the House speaker’s office and the Republican Policy Committee. Created to persuade Tea Party House members to support a debt-ceiling deal, the presentation clearly shows that Boehner viewed “automatic across-the-board cuts” (sequestration) as “a ‘cudgel’ to guarantee a reduction in federal spending — the conservatives’ necessary condition for not having America default on its obligations,” in the words of John Avlon, whose reporting for The Daily Beast turned up the smoking (digital) gun.

The GOP’s goal was to neutralize the $1.2 trillion debt ceiling increase, by “(ensuring) that any debt limit increase is met with greater spending cuts – IF Joint Committee fails to achieve at least $1.2T in deficit reduction,” the slide pictured above clearly reads.

But Avlon copped out at the last minute and, like his mainstream media colleagues, fell back on the false equivalency of blaming both parties equally for failing to “work together” on what he assumed to be a shared goal. “And now, faced with the pain that both parties voted for but nobody wants, they’re busy pointing fingers and trying to assign political blame,” he concluded.

The only reason we’re stalled in the current blind alley is the GOP’s obstinacy over approving any revenue increase that involves raising taxes or eliminating corporate loopholes – without a binding agreement with Democrats that the resulting revenues will be used to pay down the debt.

The Party of No (no taxes, no regulations, no cuts to corporate welfare, no compromise, no veracity, no accountability) has morphed into the Party of Nobody Here But Us Chickenhawks — willing, as they’ve always been over risking the lives of young Americans in opportunistic wars, to play chicken with the national economy. In their quest to impede Obama at every turn, they’re not above gambling with hundreds of thousands of jobs, hamstringing current military operations, and taking food from the mouths of hungry children if doing so will prevent a single gazillionaire from paying a dime more in federal income tax.

The Republican Party has turned even the most routine votes on fiscal policy into pitched battles that neither party wins in the end. As a result of this calculated political grandstanding, the American people come in dead last virtually every time the GOP stands in unison to block Barack Obama.

If you can't beat 'em, cheat 'em

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show coins a new Fox sobriquet: Ferret News Channel.

By Emily Theroux

The Stupid Party’s been trying to act foxy lately over the urgency of ideological “reform.”

But Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has ferreted out the Republicans’ actual intentions. The GOP’s search for a “new, improved” menu of voter comestibles is really an effort to repackage the party’s time-honored “shit sandwich.”

Unable to win presidential elections fair and square in the face of encroaching demographic turbulence, Republicans have resorted to what Stewart termed a type of “Orwellian sleight of tongue“ — a.k.a. cheating. (Oops! I meant “winning through process innovation.”) The GOP, Stewart contends, needs “a perpetual messaging refinement and distribution resource — preferably one cloaked in the trappings of journalistic authority, but without any of its ethical constraints.” In other words, a “rebranded” Roger Ailes 24/7 propaganda vehicle: “Ferret News“!

Karl Rove, 'the Architect'

Playing word games in an attempt to hoodwink low-info voters, as Fox does, is really just a variation on Republican “dirty tricks.” Originated by Richard Nixon and Chuck Colson, this reprehensible strategy dates back in recent political history to the advent of Karl Rove on the national stage at the dawn of the new millennium. We may have dodged Y2K, but enduring the mercurial machinations of Y2Karl has continued unabated for four election cycles, with mercifully declining levels of success.

• In 2000, a Supreme Court stacked with right-wing judicial activists “selected” George W. Bush as victor, after a contested election. Two subsequent media consortium reviews demonstrated Al Gore would have won at least two out of three prematurely halted manual recounts of Florida’s votes. Y2Karl’s Brooks Brothers goon squad stormed the recount effort in the first of many phony “grass roots” protests designed to fool the electorate into believing that widespread public opinion supported what was actually a minority position.

• In 2004, Dubya won reelection despite pro-John Kerry exit polls in Ohio, where allegations later surfaced of “blatant partisanship of election officials” and possible electronic ballot tampering. Two Democratic reports on the Ohio vote later suggested that many Kerry votes were suppressed by long lines, too few voting machines, and numerous instances of election officials improperly forcing Democratic voters to cast provisional ballots that were later discarded.

• In 2008, Rove served as an informal adviser to John McCain. Any stratagems he may have recommended failed to stem the Democratic tide of “hope and change” that swamped McCain and Sarah Palin, as Barack Obama won swing states by margins too wide to contest or tamper with.

• In 2012, the GOP hollered “Voter fraud!” and followed up the general panic that ensued among Fox News viewers by passing voter suppression laws in battleground states. But not even minority voter intimidation, interminable lines at polling places, billions in Citizens United super-PAC moolah, or Karl Rove’s election-night histrionics on Fox’s air could pull out a Mitt Romney win.

Abject failure in the last election hasn’t stopped Rove from reinventing himself this year, however. Rove has drawn the ire of the Tea Party after launching a new initiative by his American Crossroads super PAC, the Conservative Victory Project, designed to get moderate GOP candidates nominated in 2014 primaries instead of extremists, who often go down in flames during general-election contests.

Like a battered pop-up target in a particularly brutal game of Whac-a-Mole, the trusted consigliere whom Dubya nicknamed “Boy Genius” has sent out political green shoots in midwinter 2013. Knowing Turdblossom, the emerging “bloom” is likely to crop up as a stinkweed.

All ‘happy talk’, no policy proposals

The Republican Party establishment doesn’t appear to be following the new blueprint drafted by “the Architect” — not, at least, with any construction contracts. Most remain in the “bargaining” stage of dealing with defeat, if not the “denial” phase. Talk is cheaper and less painful than action, and anyway, wordsmithing has been the GOP’s ticket to ride since 2000, and many are reluctant to disembark from the happy-talk train.

'Maybe Republicans have hit peak Luntz' — Jon Stewart

When Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal admonished his fellow Republicans to “stop being the stupid party,” he advised the GOP to start “(talking) like adults.” This tactic, however, is nothing new. Glossology guru Frank Luntz, whom Stewart dubbed the “Republican Batman,” has long corrected what he terms “language errors,” converting them into persuasive obfuscations then uttered simultaneously by Republican “communicators” on Luntz’s cue.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor put Luntz’s “new” linguistic framing into effect earlier this week, when his speechwriters went so far as to purloin the “fair shot at success” speech delivered in December 2011 by his arch-enemy, Barack Obama (as Al Sharpton demonstrated on his MSNBC show, Politics Nation). Cantor’s purpose was to lull the ignorant sheeple into swallowing his party’s “softer focus” on “creating conditions for health, happiness, and prosperity“  — you know, stuff like education, health care, immigration reform, and the American Dream. His focus was soft, all right: gauzy words, but no policy prescriptions.

Eric Cantor. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

After all, as participants in The National Review’s recent summit on “reforming” the Republican Party concluded, the GOP need only ameliorate its delivery, not change its platform. While Karl Rove breaks ranks with the Tea Party in a desperate bid to defy demographics and reinstate the “permanent Republican majority” he has long envisioned, the (Hoping You’re) Gullible Old Party reduces its existential impasse to mere semantics.

“Rebranding,” not reform, is the GOP’s new raincheck for electoral success. Republicans haven’t quite “completed the sentence,” as Cantor offered on Morning Joe, but the clauses that form it are beginning to coalesce. Just ask Faux pundits InSannity, O’Really, or Steve Duncey — talking points have always been the most effective form of GOP cheating.


Ferret News may have dumped Palin and kicked Dick Morris to the curb, but crusty cliches don’t vanish overnight. How much do you want to bet that Fox keeps guarding the GOP henhouse?