Budget "Win" For Either Side Is Huge Loss for Nation

Even in the best-case scenario, austerity rules.

Digby:

Meanwhile, lest Democrats get it in their head that a clean vote will be Big Victory and we can all start dancing around like a bunch of drunk kids on prom night like we always do when the wingnuts pull one over:

That's a real winner isn't it? But hey, if we're lucky we'll get this "clear CR" and then the White House can start negotiating on the debt ceiling and we can cut all the "entitlements" too.

And David Atkins reminds us that this destructive austerity is taking place while the filthy, obscene rich continue to strip the middle class and working poor of every last dime.

We are living in another gilded age of rampant greed. Conservative talking points that inequality doesn't matter because the economic pie can expand infinitely have been proven to be a joke. We have a moral and economic crisis on our collective hands.

But Republicans are so crazy that all we can talk about is how much to cut from our safety net in order to placate them lest they shut down the government and throw the economy further into tailspin.

It's totally insane.

As Wonkette commenter skmind put it:

The blame game is a sideshow. The Republicans won this shutdown battle.

Think about what each side went into the fight with, and then see what each side agreed to. When they pass the clean CR, you'll have the sequester spending cuts in place.

Except for the defense spending cuts. Those have been restored.

So what the Democrats got out of this bargaining was restoration of the defense cuts, continuation of the discretionary cuts (including more SNAP cuts) and they get to keep a law which was never under any threat of being defunded.

And the Republicans? They get to undo the sequester like they had been wanting to since it went into effect.

No one will remember this shutdown enough to vote the GOP out, in a year.

Till then, we can call the Republicans poopyheads or something.

Or, we can take Charlie Pierce's advice:

Of course, what should happen now, since not much else is going on, is that the Democrats in the Senate should start dismantling The Sequester brick by brick. They should reject it, root and branch, and tell the Republicans that the deal is off and that, for every day the government gets shut down, demands for stimulus spending on social programs is the price of obstruction. Yeah, that'll happen.