Killing Ourselves Now Because Somebody Migh tTry to Kill Us Some Day

Never thought I'd have to say it to this administration, but:

How stupid do you think we are?

Charles Pierce:

Now, we have a Democratic administration, empowered by a solid re-election, that is proposing to its most loyal supporters that they support at least a partial sellout of the Democratic party's greatest legacy because, some day, a Republican president might do something much worse. (As though said imaginary Republican president won't go ahead and do much worse anyway, and claim a national mandate for it while he's at it, and eventually find a way to blame "a Democratic president" for having launched the process in the first place.) I literally never have heard this argument made in any political context. I certainly never have heard it from anyone in an incumbent administration. If this is your rationale for making policy, what in the name of god is the point of running for office in the first place? Nobody's president forever. You get elected. You enact the policies on which you ran, and of which the voters evidently approve. If, one day down the line, the voters decide to approve someone else, and someone else's policy, that's just the way it has to go. Caveat emptor, and all that. You certainly don't decide to enact policies based on their being the most palatable variation of something an imaginary future president might do. That's just nuts. On the national ecomony, we've abandoned Keynes, and Greenspan, and Laffer, and we've decided to cast our lot with Nostradamus.

We will be told — and already have been — that this is simply the president's positioning the Republicans into a corner. But that's not consonant with the quote above. That quote isn't about what's happening now. It's about telling people that they have to accept some pain now because, otherwise, they'll face agony later at some unspecified time and the hands of some unspecified president. There is only one reason for anyone in the White House to adopt this rationale, and there is only one reason for anyone in the White House to float this rationale in public. The only plausible reason for adopting this rationale, or for floating it in public, is because this is what you really want to do in the first place and you are groping for a plausible alibi. The only plausible reason for it is that you've bought the deficit-hysteria to the point where you believe that you have to do this thing right now. Nothing else makes sense, unless the White House mess has changed where it shops for its mushrooms.