Ever wonder just how inept, naive, or just downright dumb the Congressional Democrats are? You got a definitive answer to that today with the House budget vote. Given the chance to cripple the Republican propaganda machine, to decapitate Republican leadership, and to send a message that Republican thuggery is dead, Pelosi and her party did... nothing.
Worse than just rolling over like they usually do - this time they actually HELPED the Republicans. They could have let the Republican Party commit fratricide and fall apart. But the Dems are just TOO STUPID.
All Pelosi had to do was get the Democrats to vote as a bloc against Boehner's budget bill and watch the Tea Baggers eat their own leader. Boehner woulod have been HUMILIATED by his own band of legislative terrorists - the ones he's been using for the last 3 years to destroy the Democratic agenda, destroy the President's proposals, and destroy the American middle class. All Pelosi needed to do was step back and tell her party to let them shoot each other, then step in, reintroduce the SAME bill, and let her members vote their conscience. Then she rides in and saves Boehner's Day-Glo orange skin.
If the Democrats weren't so STUPID, the budget bill gets passed, Boehner is a zombie Speaker, and has to work with Democrats the rest of the session because he knows they'll let the Tea Baggers destroy him at every opportunity. The Republican leaders have to learn that they can't survive hteir own members without the DIRECT assistance of the Democrats
Boehner has a lot of hard choices to make in the next few weeks, starting with raising the debt ceiling or destroy the investment markets. The current reality is that Boehner will try to gut more Democratic programs for Republican support to raise the limit. If Pelosi had let him hang on the budget the choice would be ADD funding to the Democratic programs or the Tea Baggers would set him up for economic apocalypse.
But the Democrats are still TOO STUPID to actually stand up to the Republicans.