Looks like the GOP is being told by the Investor Class to cave on the debt limit, and are currently trying to extricate themselves from the truly insane corner they've painted themselves into.
And I think we can thank Barack Obama for his willingness to put it all on the line. I read diary after diary of "I'm so bummed out and disappointed," but I didn't see a conciliatory Obama. I saw a deadly serious Obama who was putting the real consequences of the Norquist Method on display for those gibbering dumfuks on the GOP side of the aisle. What I saw was Obama helping the GOP write a political suicide pact. It was great. It contained all of the things the GOP wanted, but the Democrats to their credit hardened their spines and said "no way we are doing this without revenue increases." In other words, if the GOP wanted to sign onto this legislation and actually gut Medicare and Social Security, they would have done so alone, with only Obama there to back them up.
Fucking brilliant.
I don't know if Obama and Pelosi and Reid coordinate this kind of strategy, but you almost have to believe that is what's going on. The White House has, indeed, floated many trial balloons that are unpalatable to the base. And I wish some of you disappointed haters would sit there and think, truly, of what the end-game of this process was. It wasn't just getting to the next election. It was taking a toy away from some truly fucking insolent toddlers and making sure they never think about playing with it again.
The "toy" of course being the debt limit. The GOP has been at this a long time, this constant screwing up of our finances. The purpose of course is to drown government in a bathtub, blah, blah, blah. They've played a very long game with it but they've played it stupid.
The end-game of "Starve the beast/Drown the government Middle Class" has always focused on running up ruinous debts, and then in a crisis claiming we can't afford entitlements anymore and slashing them. This of course would have required a President to head to the shitter in the polls and destroy his party for a generation or more, which is why the RePUKES have been trying to get a Democratic tool to do it for them for 30 years. I think GWB was supposed to try the soft-sell during his term, and it was such a soft, limp, failtastic sell that the Social Security Privatization Speaking Tour (Invite Only for Conservative Knob Gobblers) had to be canceled because it was driving GWB's poll numbers down too fast.
So they decided the second part of the job was to do the hard sell, and that meant royally fucking the economy up in the last few months of Bush's term (not a hard task, considering how many cards of houses make up our economic neighborhood) and then using the ongoing crisis as an excuse to radically cut spending. And, in a final bit of pique, they were going to force the Democrats to do the cutting (because of course nobody in the GOP has the courage of their own convictions).
But I think now that we've seen the beginning of the end of the lunacy, that Obama expected this and indeed expected it a long, long, long time ago. So he chose to do some judo (again, I keep referring to this because it is just so perfect). The GOP had momentum in one direction, and one direction only -- no new taxes, cut spending. No new taxes. Cut spending.
NO NEW TAXES. CUT SPENDING.
That is ALL the GOP could say. So Obama provided a perfectly reasonable compromise: "Cut a little here, there, and everywhere, and we will increase revenue by X amount. This seriously would balance our budget."
But what Obama's Grand Bargain also said was EVERYONE who voted for it would suffer the political consequences. I think he poisoned the well beyond what the GOP could endure, and again I think it is crucial that he had a united Democratic caucus to play bad cop to the GOP. The winners are everyone: we will most likely get a clean debt limit bill, the economy will not crash, and the GOP will not get what they want. The Democrats who stood firm against Obama get to burnish their progressive creds with their voters, they get to continue to hammer the GOP for attacking social security and medicare, and Obama -- he has no serious challenger in the 2012 election anyway. I won't be surprised if Rick Perry goes in after this anyway, seeing how easily his butt-headed party is outwitted by Obama. But neither will I be surprised if he decides to stay out and let Bachmann or whoever finally wins the clown brawl go up against Obama in 2012.
And finally, I just want to re-iterate: Obama made some very unpopular concessions in his budget negotiations and I think he did so in a deliberate effort to poison the well. That is and was a dirty job, and I commend the President for having the nerves of steel to undertake it.
The GOP just doesn't have what it takes for this game. As they continue to prove.