Monday, September 19, 2011

Ding!

Finally, the excruciating game of Rope-a-Dope ends. President Barack Obama has stopped ducking, stopped weaving, stopped laying back against the Republican Party and the professional pugilists who do its dirty work.

Obama, seemingly content to jab his way through his first thousand days in office, has at last thrown a punch, and aims to follow it up with a few quick combinations before leaving his opponents flat on their faces, a Jackson Pollack impression of themselves left on the canvas in November of next year. That's the plan, anyway.

The First Haymaker has been unleashed, with Obama's $1.5 trillion deficit reduction plan allowing the cream of the Bush tax cuts to expire. "This is not class warfare," stressed the POTUS. "It's math."

His plan is a guaranteed non-starter among the right-wing elephant herd in Congress, which wrongly perceives and portrays the closing of upper crust loopholes and the expiration of said tax cuts (restoring them to those draconian Clinton-era levels) as a tax increase.

The GOP may as well be the NOPE when it comes to tax increases, even on the Soroses, the Buffetts and the Gateses. They have chained themselves to the human anchor that is Grover Norquist and his sociopathic Club for Growth cronies. Tea Party bacteria has infected the Republican Party, and most Americans are sick of it. In this economy, it's hard to drum up sympathy for millionaires anymore.

The amazing thing is how far conservative lawmakers have stuck their chins out on this. Non-Tea Partiers, like Speaker John Boehner, were amenable to revenue increases during the debt ceiling showdown, but they were drowned out by all the uneducated hollering in the House. The few remaining realists in the Republican Party (mostly residing in the supposedly adults-only Senate) had their frustration summed up by John McCain, whose recent crack about "Hobbits" incensed the new conservative base.

Yet they will defend the uber-wealthy to the hilt, against a ginned-up so-called tax hike, because they have to - they're all-in now. The Obama plan (also generating savings from troop pullouts in Iraq and Afghanistan) should also renew the faith among his own party, which has grown weary of his propensity for using the wrong end of the olive branch... No more.

Any semi-seasoned political hack can tell you how to finish off the conservatives now that their arms, exhausted from endless flailing, are hanging limp by their sides: Link them to the Abramoff-esque lobbyists whose pork-barrel projects have pushed our nation to the brink of bankruptcy, like the $700 billion Medicare drug plan, passed by Republicans and signed by President George W. Bush in 2003. Or TARP, which gave almost a trillion dollars to banks that had already proven themselves to be irrational and irresponsible, which was drummed up over a weekend by Bush's henchmen on their way out the door. Or, y'know, the war in Iraq.

From Big Agriculture to Big Pharma, from Big Oil to Big Defense, Republican pockets are stuffed with pork. Which makes them hypocrites. That doesn't matter to the radio-zombies out there, but it does to Independents, not to mention those woefully addled voters who somehow still describe themselves as "undecided".

Obama's path to re-election looks blessedly easy at this point. The electorate is on his side on the tax issue. His approval ratings, while slackening, are still better than most of his predecessors had at this stage of their first terms. And the field of opposition candidates is so laughable as to raise the image of them all showing up to the debates in the same small, brightly-colored car.

Swing away, Mister President. By all means, swing away.

pH 9.19.11