That would have been funny at regular speed, slowing it down made it even better. How does that relate to the video I posted?
Borowitz... NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In an extraordinary gesture of recognition for a losing Presidential nominee, Time magazine today named former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney Man of the Year 1912... Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/12/time-names-mitt-romney-man-of-the-year-1912.html#ixzz2FWVGHmRW
I will say in defense of AB, that his thesis looks about right. It appears that the GOP got played. Obama kept moving to the middle, the GOP moved further right to distance themselves, and for their pains the GOP lost an election and acquired the reputation of being protesters rather than doers. So now Obama moves back to the left virtually unopposed ... the GOP has vacated the field.
So a massive increase in unaccountable executive power is a move toward "the middle"? Looking at the spectrum as a straight line doesn't make sense.
Moving the top marginal tax rate threshold to 400K, which almost no one earns, is a move toward the left?
Unfortunately in this country, yes that is the left. If anything the conservatives have done themselves a favor by moving so far to the right because now the middle ground is just right of center. That means that today's policies are more or less in line with yesterday's conservatives. Protecting Wall Street from prosecution, Romneycare, protecting tax cut for 99% of the country, the war on drugs, deporting illegal immigrants and drone attacks in the ME are all straight out of the old Republican playbook. But politics in the US is a slow game. By democrats holding the center today and isolating Republicans on the right eventually they could increase their power to the point where there may be a gradual shift back to the left. You really need to break the Republican party as a viable option for an entire generation and then maybe. But of course if history teaches us anything it's that the liberals have a knack for squandering their power and popularity when they have it so we could be back to square 1 as early as 2014 when I think the Senate could go back to red.
I wonder if the GOP's problems weren't extreme vs. moderate but longsighted vs. shortsighted...John McCain opposed the nuclear option in 2005 because he said "we'll be in the minority someday, too." President Obama played the long game on the debt ceiling "crisis," the Affordable Care Act, while the Republicans were going for the news cycle. Not to mention that the Republicans were stuck in the "independents are all that matter mindset" without taking into account the fact that the overwhelming majority of indies vote reliably partisan, AND that independent is not a stable indicator like ethnicity (can never change that, really) or age (it only goes up).
As are increased oil drilling, not mentioning climate change, and cutting the number of federal employees over the past 3 years. Adopting the Republican platform won Obama the election. But not the cooperation of Republicans. So why should he continue to occupy the middle? Might as well move to the left now. There's no more election to worry about and nothing to lose by moving away from the GOP. Every one of them voted against everything he ever proposed anyway.
I don't understand why he spent four years trying to get them to cooperate with him when it was obvious to most people right from the beginning that they weren't interested in that.
The Republicans in '08 had a fair amount of dealmakers in Washington. I can understand the hope that they might broker a relationship. But not so, the red voters didn't want that happening and those who did work with the President got primaried. I don't blame the GOP politicians, by and large. I blame the voters from the red states who punish Republicans for being reasonable.
I blame the GOP politicians exclusively. Someone wrote a book a few months ago detailing that the GOP bigwigs held a secret meeting on inauguration night 2009 at which they pledged to obstruct everything Obama proposed, and they did. The first thing they did is vote in a solid block against stimulus, which they had previously had no problem with. Heck, some of them (such as Paul Ryan) even privately wrote to the President asking for stimulus funds while excoriating the wastefulness in public. I'd have to see a timeline on how health care reform went down, but I would bet anything that the GOP leaders opposed it (it being the mandate they had previously supported) as soon as Obama proposed it, and their moronic base didn't get the pitchforks out until Fox News told them to. The obstructionism was top-down, and the million moron army just provided cover for that policy.
I continue to see this and really, I would have had more of a problem if he didn't ask for stimulus money after it had been determined that it was going to be doled out.
Yes health care was the giveaway. The President was working with thoroughly GOP ideas, working within the private-market framework, and he got punked for his effort. The health care proposal was the clear sign that the GOP would fight Obama no matter *what* he proposed; the tactic would always be to blockade rather than cooperate.
Here's the book I mentioned: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html Frank Luntz is the go-to guy when you want the mouth-breathers to grab their pitchforks, as they did during the health care town halls!
True... if he were actually against stimulus spending, which he isn't. He was all for it during Bush's first term. He was all for all of Bush's massive spending programs. The point is that he's a hypocrite and he's only against government spending when it's a Democrat proposing it.