If you believe Joe Biden is ‘some ordinary’ Joe: YOU WRONG, FOOL! It’s been several weeks since the budget hostage was taken. Many of you have been wringing hands, fussing skirts about being defaulted or ‘invoking the 14th’, ‘minting a coin’ or cutting my hair*. I’m here to tell you: It was a setup. All along. (sshh! ...don’t tell the GOP)
Yep! Joe Biden, 46th President of the United States knew what was coming down the pike and has virtually assured his reelection. You see, he ‘was in the room’ as Vice President the last time the GOP pulled this shit during debt limit negotiations under the second-best President of the U.S. and he sure as hell decided afterwards he wasn’t going to get ‘shenaniganed’ again. An old Irish saying goes something like this: ‘Fool with me once, shame on me, Fool with me again sucker and we’ll see who winds up with red faces and an angry electorate.’
Here was the Biden PLAN:
Get the country going. Out of the pandemic with shots in arms. With stimulus and job creation from programs addressing climate change and crumbling infrastructure. He worked with holdout Senators and brokered deals. He got it done. Mostly.
Joe already told us in the build-up to the Midterms that MAGA was a dangerous cult that needed to be called out for what it is: a divisive and extremist organization with no place in our democracy.
He told us, ‘You can’t negotiate with them.’ Then we settled in to get shellacked in the midterms as incumbents always do. But ROE and JOE pulled it out for America. Plenty of voters across the country got fooled but not nearly on the scale predicted in that infamous red wave that turned into a red ant that gave us the Squeaker Speaker.
And this is where he began staking out his winning budget hostage strategy. He’d pulled us through pandemic, and an attempted coup, got stimulus bills passed, revived a stagnant economy, put America back to work, and signed into law actions to build our response to global warming, to replace crumbling infrastructure and boost our ability to compete against Chinese dominance in solar and chips. All that was ‘a really big fucking deal’. And he hailed the lawmakers who supported those gains.
SOTU It’s where presidents take a victory lap. During Biden’s State of the Union, he hailed his party and their grand achievements, nearly all of it over strident GOP opposition. And then he turned to the opposition: called them out for what they have always done, set them up as he told America ‘the GOP wants to cut Social Security and safety nets’. “NOOOO!” They protested! And they swore that wasn’t their intent. (Ha!) Well… Joe took that very juicy big ‘entitlement program’ right off the menu, and there was no going back!
But that was merely the start of his playing them. Hard.
Thom Hartman explained in his excellent article about the Two Santa Clauses. how the GOP has been playing hostage with the Debt Ceiling and budget under presidents Clinton and Obama. Seeing it work before, caused them to believe they could pull this stunt again and barely-Speaker McCarthy was the one to do it, if for no other reason because it’s targeting the people who don’t vote for them: the underdogs, vulnerable. and least fortunate among us: working moms, elderly, unhoused, and the ill, different and ‘foreign’.
VP Biden had been at the table during the GOP’s Obama shakedown. He saw the malarkey and knew the GOP playbook before he ran to become 46. His gameplan: keep election promises, then run against the opposition in the next election: first calling them out, then faking them out. He Knew What Was in their playbook. Joe has his own. And it’s masterful.
It goes like this: Blow them off. Get them to show their plan. Not their hopes and dreams, but their budget cuts. Then blow them off again. Let the pundits talk. Let the ‘investigations’ and ‘hearings’ go on. All the while, the talks produce nothing, because THEY have not come up with their ‘position’, or offer. As the drama increases, he makes his usual daily duties, takes his trips, and does his thing. Let the pundits pundit. Then to demonstrate he’s committed, cancels part of an important trip with allies, and meets with the Squeaker. They tussle and McCarthy thinks he’s got an agreement on a bunch of cuts they agree on in the next (future) budget appropriations. (No hostages get shot, the GOP need only ‘make their budget list’.) ‘Speaker’ tells his caucus. We got what we want in a deal on the next appropriations. Kevin can say ‘We Won!” and Biden can say, “SUCKERS!”
What Brandon did: he has deferred shooting the hostage, and agreed to ‘talk acceptance’ of the cuts over the next budget discussions. This allows everyone to ‘save face’ and the hostage isn’t shot… Should the GOP squawkus oust McSqueker, one less issue for Brandon. If they go along, and think they have the cuts on the next go round, Brandon will pull a Lucy.
THE LUCY: After the GOP ‘negotiates’ with themselves all the silly things they want to ‘cut’, thinking Biden will keep ‘his end of the deal’, it will be close enough to the next election cycle that the voters will have become tired of the hostage crap, and SEEING what GOP wants to do to them, the House will revert to being run by the Dems.
Here’s what Biden has been up to:
His ‘chief’ negotiator had already been through this charade and the two ‘entered negotiations’ with three goals:
1. Eliminate the current threat to the robust Biden economy.
2. Convince MAGA that they were going to get a ‘win’.
3. Pulling a Lucy. Thereby winning the next presidential election.
Oh yea…..Should the GOP pull back from the ‘agreement’, Brandon, mints a coin, pulls it from behind former Speaker McCarthy’s ear, and says: “Gotcha!” (or alternately issues an executive order that the debt ceiling is waved under National Emergency Order and decrees Yellin ‘pay the bills in full’ complying with this Executive Order, send Congress the bill and let the GOP litigate those cuts in court.
*my hair: well it’s pretty damned long and I could get scalped for saying all the stuff I’ve written here, and while my precious hair keeps me warm, it doesn’t keep me up at night, should I have to cut it off for being wrong.
* Unless you were dead and missed it, Minority Leader Jeffries held a conference announcing ALL Dems in the house approved a measure to deal with the Debt Crisis. All they need are 5 (FIVE) republican members to see their senses and join them to prevent chaos.