Moe Lane

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) This is not going to end up being a windmill joust against Barack Obama.  Much to the Democrats’ secret displeasure.

GOP leaders will help coordinate various House investigations into controversies involving the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the State Department.

But the key Republican lawmaker with jurisdiction on all these matters said that a rerun of the Clinton-era probes won’t occur.

“These are all different agencies of government. This administration owns the failures, but not necessarily the direct blame … we’re looking at each individual case so it’s very different than what you view historically as a target where it [was] always about President Clinton. This isn’t about President Obama,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.

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Surely the National Journal is asking a rhetorical question here, yes?

When Mark Sanford debated a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in his South Carolina race last week, it was a replay of a tried-and-true Republican strategy: Demonize Pelosi and wrap her like a stone around your opponent’s neck.

The tactic can be effective, torn from a well-worn playbook that dates from nearly a decade ago. But it does beg a question: Why isn’t Speaker John Boehner targeted in the same way by Democrats?

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The President can’t be bothered to go himself, you see.  Or – and this is the actually offensive part – send anybody currently from the administration.

Whitehall sources have revealed that the US delegation at tomorrow’s service in St Paul’s Cathedral will be led by two Reagan era secretaries of state: James Baker and George Shultz.

Though President Obama himself had not been expected to attend, there had been speculation that he would be represented either by Vice President Joe Biden or wife Michelle. However, the Obama administration had said it would not be attending Thatcher’s funeral before the Boston bombings…

The excuse here for the lack of the VP or FLOTUS is this, I kid you not:

[A US Embassy spokesman] said that both the First Lady and the Vice President were ‘the President’s point people on gun control’, adding: ‘This is a week when there is a lot of movement on Capitol Hill on gun control issues.’

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The Wall Street Journal, no doubt wondering what it did in a previous lifetime to deserve this, looks at the, um, special way that the Obama administration views the world:

The president’s insistence that Washington doesn’t have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called “a health-care problem.” Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—”They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system”—he replied: “Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.” He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: “I’m getting tired of hearing you say that.”

We will now pause while the usual own-goal derision is made towards Speaker John Boehner, or indeed pretty much any other Republican politician mentioned by name these days. Although how this gets us back in power is left as an exercise for the reader…

Moe Lane

Via:

Read this article, then pick your jaw up off the floor. online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…

— John Ekdahl, Jr. (@JohnEkdahl) January 7, 2013

Robert Costa of NRO has the details*, and the short version is as follows: Americans Majority Action staffer Ron Meyer Jr. got caught up in an attempt to get rid of House Speaker John Boehner for Boehner’s refusal to play King Canute; this all went along reasonably until Meyer et al fell in with various disgruntled House Republicans with their own axes to grind; and hi-jinks, as they say, ensued.  End result: John Boehner 1, Disgruntled House Republicans 1, AMA 0.  Moral of the story**?  You can like politicians.  You can be friends with politicians.  You can even have a drink with a politician.  But you should never, ever, ever, ever blindly trust one when he or she tells you that of course something is going to happen.  If it was certain as he or she claimed, you wouldn’t have needed to be reassured in the first place***.

Here endeth the lesson.

Moe Lane (more…)

Now that it’s official that John Boehner has won the Speakership again – which, by the way, was a foregone conclusion, given that nobody wanted to go on the record as being an opposition candidate – let us note very quickly this little bit of profane drama from last week:

House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday.

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself.”

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Philip Klein:

Ever since John Boehner’s “fiscal cliff” backup plan went down in flames on Thursday, there’s been a flood of speculation as to whether he can still survive as speaker of the House. But there’s a very fundamental question that a lot of people floating this possibility need to address: Why on earth would anybody want the job?

Right now, I wouldn’t take the job on a bet myself.  Thanks largely to what turned out to be an absolute disaster of a 2012 Presidential campaign – and, don’t forget: I expected that we were going to win the damned thing, too – we’re not in a good situation right now.  Sorry to write that, but it’s true.  Personally?  I would have passed the damned full extension, permanently linked the AMT to inflation, given Big Medicine the Hawaiian Good-Luck Symbol by killing the doc fix, partially paid for it all by capping the home mortgage deduction at 200K and ending deductions for state/local income taxes, dropped the mike, and gone home.  They’re going to hate us anyway, so we might as well. (more…)

The quote in question:

[Congress is] just a slice of America, it really is. We got some of the smartest people in the country who serve here, and some of the dumbest.

I mean, I say this every freaking day. There are Members of Congress that I wouldn’t trust to put their shoes on the right way three days running.  I’m cheered to hear that the Speaker of the House is under no illusions, either…

That’s not all he’s extending.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has formally offered an invitation to the President to give his annual State of the Union address.

As we work together to end this legislative year by advancing initiatives to help Americans struggling a difficult economy, we must also look ahead for new opportunities to put solutions before politics.  In the coming year,. Republicans will continue our efforts to create an environment for economic growth and job creation, and we welcome an opportunity to hear your new ideas for working with the Congress.  There fore, I am privileged to invite you to deliver an address on the State of the Union on January 25, 2012, before a Joint Session of Congress.

Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to your response.

You know, I just bet that Speaker Boehner does.  Not that Barack Obama dares respond as he would like to; which is to say, with a blistering oath or two. (more…)

Do Not F*ck With The Speaker Of The House.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday agreed to unveil new jobs proposals in an address to Congress on September 8, bowing to pressure from Republicans, who objected to the original date set for his high-profile speech.

Obama’s long-awaited proposals could set the agenda in Washington for the coming months, but his preferred date of September 7 had an unpalatable political edge for the opposition party: Republican presidential candidates were scheduled to hold a televised debate on the same evening, at the same time.

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I cannot BELIEVE that I had to write that out.

The basic gist of this is as follows: President Barack Obama has requested – please note that word – that he be permitted to address Congress about jobs in a special joint session next Wednesday evening at 8 PM. Unfortunately, the White House is apparently as self-aware about national events as is, say, a brain-damaged basset hound, because it unaccountably missed noticing that there was a major Republican debate scheduled for that date and time. One being hosted by a major news network (NBC) and online news site (Politico). Such an abject lack of intellectual curiosity about one’s surroundings – remember, it’s the White House itself which is claiming that they had not known about the conflict ahead of time – is perhaps not unexpected from this administration, but it’s certainly not what you would call seemly. Or adult. Indeed, calling it ‘adolescent’ defames teenagers.

Now, everybody here knows the truth – the White House is desperately trying to control the conversation about Obama’s performance to date, largely because if they don’t the conversation will be Barack Obama: Tedious Idiot, or Blithering Idiot? – but we’re expected to pretend otherwise. I shall not: and before I go any further, let me just note that there’s a reason why we have a minimum age requirement for the Presidency. It’s because the Founding Fathers wanted to keep children from running this country.

Alas. (more…)

Roll Call titled this article “Boehner Threads a Needle,” and I think that they have the right of it.  If he had lost control of the debt ceiling process, Speaker Boehner would have been crippled for the rest of this term, and probably been out of the leadership cadre as soon as it could have been done without unnecessary embarrassment; as it is, the various factions of the GOP caucus have a pretty good idea of how far they can all push things before they run up against the Speaker of the House’s power, which is… considerable, in this country*.

Fortunately, this entire exercise should also give the Speaker an idea about how very, very seriously the Right is taking fiscal issues right now, too.  Given that Speaker Boehner would very much like to keep being Speaker Boehner, that’s all to the good.

Moe Lane

PS: I know that a lot of folks are unhappy about the final deal: not enough ground was recaptured.  True.  We didn’t liberate Paris on June 7, 1944, either… oh, sorry, violent rhetoric.  My bad.

*One reason why so few Speakers run for President; it’s almost as powerful a job and, apparently, often a lot more fun.