President Obama earlier today in Missouri, proposing a pretty good analogy for the insanity of the GOP approach towards the debt limit:
I just want to break this down one more time. I go into a Ford dealership. I drive off with a new F-150. Unless I paid cash, I've still got to pay for it each month. I can’t just say, you know, I’m not going to make my car payment this month. That’s what Congress is threatening to do—just saying, I'm not going to pay the bills.
There are consequences to that. The bill collector starts calling you, right? Your credit goes south, and you've got all kinds of problems. Same is true for a country.
And, uncharacteristically, the president named names:
So if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, we're deadbeats. "If we fail to increase the debt limit, we would send our economy into a tailspin”—that’s a quote, by the way, what I just said. You know who said it? The Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner.
The Republican Speaker has said if we don't pay our bills, we'll have an economic tailspin. So this is not just my opinion. This is everybody's opinion.
And he didn't just single out Boehner's hypocrisy, he went after the entire GOP right-wing cabal that is hell-bent on blowing up the country if they don't get their way on defunding Obamacare:
Unfortunately, there is a faction on the far right of the Republican Party right now—it's not everybody, but it's a pretty big faction—who convinced their leadership to threaten a government shutdown and potentially threaten to not raise the debt ceiling if they can't shut off the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Obama also added some context about what it is that Republicans are pushing for—that not only is it wrong for them to be threatening chaos, but they're also threatening chaos simply to deny people access to affordable health insurance:
Defunding Affordable Health Care would rob 25 million Americans of the chance to get health care coverage. It would cut basic health care services for tens of millions of seniors on Medicare already. That's what House Republicans are fighting for. And now they’ve gone beyond just holding Congress hostage, they're holding the whole country hostage.
In the past, Obama has often been reluctant to call out Republicans by name, preferring subtle jabs than outright haymakers. But he seemed to enjoy himself today, and he certainly wasn't holding back. It's good to see, because if there's one thing we've learned over the past few years it's that sweet talking Republicans isn't going to knock any sense into them. They've got to held accountable for the insanity of their positions. And the only that can happen is if President Obama leads the way, as he did today.
