Sunday, January 27, 2013

Obama's Latest Ploy: House GOP Members Bogus

With Barack Obama, it's always something.
There's always some bellyache; always some excuse; always some whine; always some reason why he can't seem to accomplish everything (or sometimes even anything) that he wants to accomplish.
Now comes Obama's latest lament: It's the Republican members of the House who are blocking him and this is sooo wrong because somehow they're not even in legitimate seats representing legitimate districts.
Wha . . . . ?
You heard that right.
In fact, here's what the president jut told the liberal New Republic in an interview:
The House Republican majority is made up mostly of members who are in sharply gerrymandered districts that are very safely Republican and may not feel compelled to pay attention to broad-based public opinion, because what they're really concerned about is the opinions of their specific Republican constituencies.
There are going to be a whole bunch of initiatives where I can get more than fifty percent support of the country, but I can't get enough votes out of the House of Representatives to actually get something passed.
"I can get more than fifty percent of the country?" 
Well, Mr. President -- maybe.
Need we remind you barely broke fifty percent in the election which you won with fifty-one percent of the vote?  Yes, you managed to slide by with a victory that was dependent on 330,000 votes in four states. And now you're popularity has dropped below fifty percent once again. So, you hardly have a clear mandate from the American people. In fact, you're the first president in nearly a hundred years to be elected to his second term with a smaller margin of victory than the first.

And, there's more.
When the president is not blaming "gerrymandered' districts and illegitimately-elected Republicans, he's blaming Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, suggesting that they're actually calling the shots for the GOP. Here's what he says about his prospects, going forward:
One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it.
So, from the way Obama tells it, there are no Democrats elected from safe or gerrymandered districts. And Democrat voters are open-minded; surely no Democrat voters engage in bloc voting. Horrors! And Democrats are not subject to pressure from traditionally liberal media outlets (of which there are far more than conservative-leaning outlets). And Democrats don't answer to their own set of rigorously progressively cheerleaders and enforcers such as the AFL-CIO, the NEA, the trial lawyers and others. Oh, of course not. No way!

Simply taken at face value, President Obama's arguments are laughable -- or at least they would be if they weren't so sad and pathetic!

No comments: