La Résistance

Per usual, Roy is spot-on here. The stimulus plan thus far, whether attributed to Obama or Fredo, sucks balls. There's no two ways about it. The idea, however, that any Republican has mustered anything at all aside from notional opposition is hilarious.

On the one hand, I'm tempted to hand it to them as being estimable players of parliamentary games. They seem to know, where people such as Harry Reid seem not to, where and how to tilt at their chosen windmills -- that is, under the watchful gaze of the bonehead media, whose job as they understand it is simply to deliver rather than debunk.

The Republicans are used to running on pure muscle and gall, making up for a current lack of the former with an inexhaustible supply of the latter, and they know that only media humps would be scared of a guy named "Boner". And Obama still has to learn the art of the smackdown, that since he won, there is no upside to be gained in negotiating with losers and morons. Bush didn't know much, but he knew that at least.

But this may actually be a case of the last vestiges of post-Gingrichite holdouts overplaying a non-existent hand, hoping that your opponent overplays his hand first, and you're there to claim victory. It's what they have to do; they have no other cards to play.

Yet this is a case where the situation is essentially catastrophic in nature, and actually getting worse, and their master plan is simply to be barriers to implementation, hoping to appeal to yahoos who are more worried about providing condoms and birth-control pills to people who can't afford to have children in the first place, than about their own jobs and homes. Anyone with such priorities deserves to lose their job and house, which is why no one really has that luxury these days.

So good luck with that, guys. Let us know how that works out for you next year. Because either the stimulus plan will "work", to the extent it can address systemic problems in a short-run situation, and the obstructionists will be left entirely on the outside looking in, or it won't, which is still no guarantee that their non-plan would suddenly look better by comparison. No one is going to say, "Gee, if only we'd given the financial sector more tax cuts, this thing would have turned around by now!"

The finance weasels got their fucking bailout, and they're goddamned lucky we haven't strung them up. It's not really a good time to be humping anyone's leg for more and better tax cuts.