At every turn, this once discreet tactic is failing the GOP and with just a few months away from the elections they are scrambling to hurt the economy big time so they can make Obama a one term President.
I should think that all those GOP strategists with pie on their faces must be scrambling to find a rock to crawl under. You talk about incompetence, these guys have to take first places…I don’t know how many of them there are, I don’t even know who they are but they exist and they have not only misread the sentiments of the American people but they have also miscalculated the recovery of the economy.
What they have been scrambling to do is to actually sabotage the economy from day one of President Obama’s term very well defined by Minority Senate Leader McConnell who stated that their number one priority was to make President Obama a one term President.
It hasn’t always been obvious as the Republicans have a way of passing legislation and doing their damage with hidden motives and catastrophic result expectations. One good example is their nationwide effort to decimate labor unions. What these Republicans didn’t even dream was that the electorate would rebel and the whole thing has backfired where recalls are the norm and a corrupt Governor is counting his days left in office. His fake claim that it was a budgetary issue and not a war on unions blew up on his face.
The bogus claim that there is fraud in voting has also seen a national GOP effort to disenfranchise voters; but the truth of the matter is that there is no significant fraud if any and it really boils down to preventing minorities from partaking of their democracy because these people the GOP are disenfranchising usually vote for Democrats.
The Republicans have tried everything; from the birth certificate thing to questioning the President’s religious faith in an effort to vilify him and make him appear as a threat, an intruder, one who is not one of us…has it worked? The answer is a resounding no even though some Republicans still believe the President was not born in Hawaii but in Kenya and a great many also think that he is a Muslim even though the President is responsible for doing away with Osama bin Laden.
Republicans are now embarking on a new scheme: that President Obama is responsible for higher gas prices. This too will blow up on their faces taking into consideration that gas prices are always at the mercy of speculators, will have no connection to any action the President will take…ironically, the President proposes to slap those speculators with regulations and taxes that the Republicans oppose.
How terribly off the Republicans strategists are on this one also. We know from historical data of gasoline prices that the oil companies raise the cost per gallon at the beginning of summer and then lower it when the demand wanes…yet they don’t reduce it to the price it was to begin with, thus ensuring higher prices that will exact them higher profits.
The office of House Speaker John Boehner posted this graph on their blog, saying that "gas prices have doubled since President Obama took office."
While that statement is factually true, it's also intentionally deceptive. What isn't even factually true is this line from their blog post:
The President’s anti-energy policies are not just driving up gas prices; they are costing American jobs and perpetuating our dependence on foreign oil.
Explain this graph then, Mr. Speaker.
Each and every issue the Republicans have chosen to discredit the President and to use as a weapon has failed them miserably…from Health Care Reform to Women’s rights over their own health, from labor union attacks to proposing child labor to replace janitors and so on…it is unfathomable that they are not learning anything from this…and yet they continue their relentless effort to sabotage the economy.
Which brings me to the point: Most people recognize that Bush and the Republican left us with an economic mess, a recession the likes of which we had not seen in 60 years. The American people know this and as much as the Republicans would like to think that their attention span is short or that they are suffering from collective amnesia, they are wrong there too because the American people know who caused their misery.
Americans in general realize that the Reagan “TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS” didn’t work and never will.
But just imagine how much faster the recovery would have been if Republicans had not sabotaged the economy? Think how much prosperous our country would have been and how many of our citizens would have been spared bankruptcy, foreclosures, dying from lack of medical care and getting laid off from their jobs?
Michael Tomasky on GOP Plans to Sink the Economy
by Michael Tomasky Mar 13, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
Every month brings improved job news—and bleaker prospects for the Republicans in November. Which is why they’re contemplating economic sabotage as their only hope.
“We’re just under eight months away from Election Day now, which means that the GOP is starting to run out of time to think up new ways to ruin the economy so that Barack Obama doesn’t get reelected. The Republicans have to do this delicately, of course; they can’t be open about it lest it become too obvious that harming the economy is their goal. But they have to be aggressive enough about it for their efforts to bear some actual (rotten) fruit. There are three fronts—gas prices, jobs, and the budget—on which we should keep our eyes open for signs that the Republicans are trying to achieve Mitch McConnell’s No. 1 goal for America.
Let’s take them in order. The Republicans received joyous news Monday in the form of the Washington Post poll that showed Obama’s numbers sinking in inverse proportion to rising gas prices. The gas situation is perfect for the GOP for two reasons. First, there’s very little a president can actually do about gas prices. Second, even though those prices don’t really tell us much about the more general economy, most people have the impression that they do, so for the out-party, it’s just a free whack.
No one can blame Republicans for using Obama as a piñata on the issue. But here’s what they can be blamed for. What is causing these high prices? Not low supply and high demand, which is what they teach you in school. In fact, supply is high—domestic oil production is at its highest point in years, higher under this allegedly business-hating president than under oilmen Bush and Cheney. And demand has been low because of the economy, although it’s now picking up.
No, experts blame a lot of the increase on fervid speculation in the oil markets, and a chief reason for a lot of that speculation is anxiety in those markets about a possible war with Iran. Said anxiety, in turn, is heightened every time a politician blusters about how we have no choice now but to go start that war. So this kind of rhetoric is a nice little two-fer for Republicans, who get to sound like tough guys and can also take comfort in knowing that the more they talk up attacking Iran, the more they’re doing their small part to keep prices high.
Now let’s look to jobs. As you may know, while we’ve been getting these hopeful job reports these last few months, there is one sector that’s been lagging notably: the public sector. In fact, during 2011 the public sector across the country—state and local governments, in addition to the feds—laid off massive numbers of people. Public-sector job losses averaged 22,000 a month in 2011. State and municipal governments are laying people off mainly for two reasons: the economy, which means they’re bringing in less revenue, and the drastic cuts in federal aid, which have forced the layoffs and firings of nearly half a million public-sector workers in the last two years.
Every out-party does a little discreet cheering for the economy to be weak. But the GOP has more invested in economic failure than any out-party I can remember in my lifetime.
True, Republicans want smaller budgets on ideological grounds. But they also know very well that the more domestic discretionary spending cuts they can force, and the more public employees they can make states and cities shave off their payrolls, the greater the negative effect on the overall employment picture. If those nearly half-million people were still working, what would the unemployment rate be? Maybe down to a flat 8 percent.
Lately, though, things are starting to look worrisome on that front for Republicans. In February, the public sector cut just 6,000 workers, well down from last year’s average. This indicates that the party might not be able to count for long on the public-sector numbers dragging down the private-sector ones. Hmmm. What to do about that?
Interestingly and conveniently, exactly what the Republicans on Capitol Hill are doing right now! They have been signaling lately that the budget numbers they agreed to with Democrats last year in the debt deal need to be revisited, and the cuts must be even deeper. Speaker John Boehner is open about the possibility of reneging. He has sent some mixed signals—he’s also talked about trying to get the House to accept a transportation bill that the Senate has already passed by the eye-poppingly bipartisan margin of 85–11. New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer says the bill can create 3 million jobs. The House returns to Washington next Monday. Where would you put the odds that this House of Representatives will vote, less than eight months before the election, to support a bill that Chuck Schumer boasts can produce 3 million jobs?
Every out-party does a little discreet cheering for the economy to be weak. But the GOP has put itself in a unique position. By opposing everything Obama wanted with such ferocity; by saying all those thousands of times that he had no clue about the economy; by sending out a parade of presidential candidates, from the semi-serious to the clown posse, all of whose central criticism of Obama is that he killed the economy—in all of these ways the party has more invested in economic failure than any out-party I can remember in my lifetime. Its best hope for now is gas prices, but even they eventually get lower, usually by late summer. Beyond that, all the GOP has to rely on is Mitt Romney’s unstoppable charisma.”
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Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
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