I Know You Are But What Am I Politics: 101
by digby
Irony Alert: “House Republicans are preparing to vote en bloc against the $106 billion war-spending bill, a position once unthinkable for the party that characterized the money as support for the troops,” The Hill points out. “For years, Republicans portrayed the bills funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as matters of national security and accused Democrats who voted against them of voting against the troops.”
“Congressional Republicans are at their weakest point politically in decades, but they still appear to be keeping Democrats on the defensive when it comes to national security,” Roll Call writes
The Democrats halfheartedly ran a few ads saying that the Republicans didn’t support the troops but didn’t really follow though because they actually didn’t believe in the war funding themselves. So, the Republicans got away with doing what they accused the Democrats of doing for years.
Now we have this:
After years of trying to cut Medicare spending, Republican lawmakers have emerged as champions of the program, accusing Democrats of trying to steal from the elderly to cover the cost of health reform.
[…]
The cuts are designed to be relatively painless. Except for an increase in premiums for wealthier subscribers to the Medicare drug plan, the Baucus bill would not increase premiums or co-payments, or explicitly cut benefits, for most Medicare beneficiaries.
[…]Fifty-six percent of seniors said they thought reform would weaken the Medicare program. With seniors likely to make up nearly 20 percent of the electorate in 2010, Republicans see Medicare as a potent campaign issue. In the Finance Committee, GOP senators moved repeatedly to strip the spending cuts from the bill.
For decades, the Republicans have been trying to gut Medicare. And every time they screamed bloody murder that the Democrats were “trying to scare seniors” when the Democrats pointed out what they were doing. Today, they are shamelessly doing exactly what they accused the Dems of doing — and they are getting away with it.
It takes a lot of brass to be this brazenly hypocritical but they realize something that the Democrats don’t, which is that there is no accountability for conservatives. Ever. And that’s mostly because the liberals are confused by this and just keep playing by rules that only apply to themselves. In politics, the assault on reason is now a full fledged, mob beat down and reason is on life support.
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