Martin Bashir's Clear the Air segment comparing the Republican ceiling debate to a parent's lullaby.
Transcript below
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Clear the Air
A new book on parenting is provoking some controversy because it seems to focus not on the joy that comes with a newborn but the pain that a baby brings to his parents, especially when it comes to sleep.
The audio version of Adam Mansbach’s book employs the voice of the great actor, Samuel L. Jackson and here’s an example of how it reads:
“The whales huddle down in the deep; I’ll read you one last book if you swear you’ll go the [expletive] to sleep.”
For some parents, Adam Mansbach’s book is not before time, a chance to tell it like it is.
Children are hard work, sleep is disturbed and even loving parents can sometimes crack under the pressure and swear at their kids.
And isn’t that exactly how all of us feel about this ridiculously prolonged, torturous and confused attempt to raise the debt ceiling? Trying to reach a deal has been much more painful than trying to get an alert baby off to sleep.
One minute Speaker Boehner says he has a bipartisan plan that will sail through the House. The next, his counting skills are exposed as entirely wrong by the budget office and he can’t even rely on members of his own caucus, despite his bogus claims of bipartisanship.
And this has been going on for six months. Six months. And the trouble is that just as parents see the clock ticking as they wait desperately for their child to go off to sleep, so now we have less than seven days to reach an agreement or trigger the first default in American history. It’s desperate and judging by the thousands of phone calls to Congress yesterday, Americans are becoming increasingly angry.
And yet, what do we hear today from Mr. Boehner? Another ludicrous lullaby that won’t pass through the Senate and even if it got to the president; he’s already said he’ll veto it. But still Mr. Boehner goes on, singing his nursery rhyme of more cuts and no taxes of Cut, Cap and Balance … of cut this, cut that and don’t you dare raise revenues.
Maybe it’s time for Mr. Boehner to handover responsibility to Harry Reid and the president, and go to sleep …