Freedom Line Blog

As I have written and argued repeatedly for months, President Obama wants a crisis. He plans to use a crisis to seize even more power for himself and for the government. Now he is a significant step closer to his goal. Despite his finger-pointing con-job in his nasty press conference this afternoon, Obama is the one who deliberately torpedoed the budget talks. He is the one who has yet to put an actual plan on the table. He is the one who refused to even let GOP negotiators talk. He is the one who insisted through most of the year that no other provisions be attached to the hike in the debt limit — that the debt limit hike should be “clean” rather than include even a single cost saving. Now, as Speaker John Boehner just said, and as so many others have said in less vivid language, “dealing with the president is like negotiating with a bowl of Jello.” He just won’t stay still. And he’s doing it on purpose. He’s doing it because he doesn’t want a deal. He wants a crisis. This is a very dangerous game he’s playing, but he’s playing to win. And if he wins, we all lose — we lose financially, and we lose at least some of our freedom. Mark my words. This is what Obama’s game is. To try to win it, he has been fibbing, faking, and fulminating. Once he wins it, he will do far worse.

Fred Barnes’ story at the Weekly Standard about our supercilious, self-important, rude, overbearing, blowhard of a president is absolute must reading. It explains why these budget talks have been unproductive: because Barack Hussein The One The Redeemer Obama has absolutely no regard for anybody else’s opinion, no patience with dissent of any kind — and no manners. In short, he’s a boor — a boor with authoritarian inclinations:

The president has been less genial away from the prying eyes of the press and the public. In the private talks, he’s dominated the discussion with the eight most senior members of Congress in an overbearing way not likely to lead to compromise. He’s been argumentative. He’s come across as President Blowhard.

After Sperling briefed the group on the deficit cap proposal, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi addressed another subject. When a Republican participant criticized the deficit cap, Obama interrupted with a monologue. When the Republican tried to speak a second time, the president quickly cut him off and delivered another sermon on why the criticism was wrong.

I have argued all along that Obama doesn’t really even want a deal. He wants  a crisis. His behavior — pretending to be the adult and compromiser in public while actually torpedoing progress in private — is exactly that of somebody who is trying to foment a crisis from which he can benefit.

That’s why Charles Krauthammer makes sense:

[D]are the president to put the country in default on the basis of ‘I won’t accept anything short. I only want something that will serve me on Election Day.’

All of this talk about a Balanced Budget Amendment is fine and dandy, but it has NOTHING to do with the debt ceiling fight. It is literally impossible to get a BBA in time for the debt limit deadline. The best thing to do is to stop talking and actually pass spending cuts attached to a short-term lifting of the debt limit. Even better, doing a shorter-term debt limit hike also means the spending cuts, while substantial, are less likely to include things against which Obama can demagogue. In other words, the cuts, while not as big in total dollars, can be more carefully chosen for PR purposes — and they will accompany a more restrained debt-limit hike, which itself sends a message that conservatives refuse to give carte blanche to debt as high as Obama wants the new limit to be.

Yes, call Obama’s bluff. The way to do that is to pass a politically palatable bill with real savings — and leave extraneous things out of it.