[O]ne thing Americans simply will not accept is another tax increase to replace spending reductions we already agreed to.
— Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, yesterday
He’s right, of course, since, by “Americans,” he means the roughly 278 Americans who comprise the House and Senate Republican caucuses.
As Greg Sargent points out this morning, a recent Pew poll suggests that about ¾ of the remainder of Americans–the ones who are not among the “we” who already agreed to tax rate increases on couples with incomes of more than $450,000 and individuals with incomes of more that $400,000–actually beg to differ with Sen. McConnell on that assessment of what the American people will ever accept.
So, obviously, McConnell doesn’t mean those American people. Even assuming that those American people are even Americans. Or even people. (No one’s polls corporate people, as far as I know, but I suspect that many of them would side with McConnell, so we’ll give him that. But that doesn’t meant that the Americans who were polled were people. They may be cyborgs. Or dogs.)
He also doesn’t mean the American people who voted by a majority of about 5 million last November for the presidential candidate who campaigned on a platform of raising tax rates on incomes of more than $250,000 for couples and $250,000 for individuals, and on closing tax loopholes and eliminating deductions available mostly to the wealthy. Rest assured; he definitely does not mean those American people, most of whom committed voter fraud by voting in the election, since although they are people, they are, by virtue of their vote for Obama, not really Americans, whether or not they were born in Hawaii (or California or New York or New Mexico or New Hampshire) or instead in Kenya.
Nor does he mean the American people who voted by substantial aggregate majorities to decrease rather than increase the number of Republican senators and representatives in the current Congress–a Congress whose members are not, by the way, the “we” in the “we already agreed to.”
The article I linked to above for that quote is one by Michael D. Shear in today’s New York Times, called “White House Counts on G.O.P. to Bend as Cuts’ Effects Are Felt.” It’s chock full of great points, including that “[s]trategists for [John] Boehner believe that Republicans have been successful in branding the cuts as Mr. Obama’s idea.” I hope so, since proposal of “the cuts” at issue were the only alternative to a Republican-forced default on America’s already-incurred debt, including on treasury bonds, and since the cuts that were Obama’s idea probably are more popular than the cuts that are the Republicans’ idea-none to the Defense Department’s budget and draconian ones to almost every other discretionary program and agency.
Which brings me to the newest journalistic gimmick in reporting on all this. Well, I’ll just quote Shear illustrate:
In accepting the inevitability of an extended Washington stalemate, the White House is risking the possibility that Americans may eventually blame the president, not members of Congress, for job losses, smaller paychecks, longer lines at airports, a reduction in government services and a less well-equipped military.
Uh-huh. The White House is risking the possibility that Americans may eventually blame the president, not members of Congress, for job losses, smaller paychecks, longer lines at airports, a reduction in government services and a less well-equipped military. And the likelihood that that will happen is very high, since the Republicans are unwilling to trade more tax revenue from the wealthy and from profits-hoarding corporations for fewer job losses, no reduction in paychecks, ordinary-length lines at airports, little or no reduction in government services and a well-equipped military.
Er, I mean, the American people are unwilling to make that trade. But they won’t blame themselves. Instead, they’ll blame Obama. Who is, although certainly a person, not an American one.