Zombie Border wants to eat your brains
by digby
I just can't ...
What is Boehner’s legacy?
— No grand bargain as Speaker: “Boehner never landed the really big deal he craved,” Post congressional reporter Paul Kane writes. “Not the $4 trillion tax-and-entitlement deal he reached for in 2011, not the repackaged version a year later and not the immigration overhaul he sought in 2014. He most clearly learned the limits of his power midway through his nearly five-year tenure when he scaled down his ambitions for ‘Plan B’ — a tactical gambit aimed at forcing Democrats to preserve Republican tax cuts. Conservatives rebelled because those making more than $1 million would have faced tax increases … That utter defeat left him unable to ‘go big,’ as he liked to say, his effort to find a legacy-defining piece of legislation coming largely to a close. In the three years since, he mostly has been treading water.” “Boehner’s personal highs and lows often personified the conflicts inside the larger House Republican conference as it approached the task of governing,” Politico’s David Rogers writes in his analysis.
— Obama arguably deserves as much or more blame for that failure as Boehner. The President has also struggled to stand up to the far left. “Fairly or not, Obama and Boehner, as much captives as leaders of their respective parties, will be indelibly identified with the dysfunction of their times,” The Post’s White House bureau chief, Juliet Eilperin, explains in her own look at the relationship between the two men. Like PK, she focused on the failed grand bargain of 2011 as a turning point the duo never recovered from. “But it was Obama, the one who felt stranded at the altar in the past, who decided to move on. At the start of 2014, the president decided to pursue a strategy that emphasized executive action … The moves came with political costs — and a lawsuit, filed by Boehner, challenging Obama’s authority.” The only time they really cooperated this year was on trade promotion authority.
Utter and complete bullshit.
What they are saying is that Obama should have just kept kissing GOP ass and getting absolutely nothing for it --- selling out everything he and his party ever stood for --- because to do otherwise is a sign that he's capitulating to the "far left".
That is the Village folks. It' doesn't get any more High-Broder than that. They cannot see a world in which the "far left" isn't the great enemy of bipartisanship even in the face of a White House that put its party's most precious legacy on the table and was shown the back of the hand by the far right. According to this it was supposed to humbly submit to even more of that and say "thank you sir, can I have another."
It doesn't get any worse than this. If they cannot see that the party whose front runner for the presidency is a xenophobic racist freakshow and which chased John Boehner out of the speaker's chair because they want to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood is the cause of DC gridlock then there is no help for them. None.
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