Oh God, This Again?

Elias Isquith

Elias Isquith is a freelance journalist and blogger. He considers Bob Dylan and Walter Sobchak to be the two great Jewish thinkers of our time; he thinks Kafka was half-right when he said there was hope, "but not for us"; and he can be reached through the twitter via @eliasisquith or via email. The opinions he expresses on the blog and throughout the interwebs are exclusively his own.

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6 Responses

  1. Tod Kelly says:

    You know what’s sad, Elias? That this headline works for almost everything that’s happening in DC right now that’s being talked about in the press.Report

  2. Barry says:

    There’s an old saying from Japanese samurai – ‘the peasant should not be allowed to die, but neither should he be allowed to live’.

    The elites really, really want to steal our retirement and medical care. The ideologues want to help (usually, they’re set up so that it won’t bite them on the *ss). The masses don’t want this (even most of the Tea Party), but the power of the elites is that they can get away with taking ‘no’ to mean ‘try again later’.Report

  3. Burt Likko says:

    I don’t see advantage to Boehner et al. in reaching a Grand Bargain. Of necessity, the Democrats must be able to hold up a trophy and say “We got you this!” and if they can proclaim any sort of victory the Republicans’ base will accuse Boehner of caving in and selling out. Even if the substance of the deal is 90% what the GOP said they wanted going in.

    I do see an advantage to Obama for reaching a Grand Bargain — he can say he avoided another sequester, he gets a trophy, he can call himself a “centrist” and a “uniter” and all the rest of that. A policy loss is still a political win for him. Ergo, it is a tactical loss for the Republicans, but that’s getting back to my first paragraph.

    So the least bad result we can hope for, in my opinion, is another sequester. “Least bad” does not mean I’m happy about that. If Republicans weren’t on autopilot to “destroy Obama no matter what” that might be different.Report