Which include two out of the three paragraphs I quoted last; I was never speaking on the basis of half a sentence.

No worries, that was fairly tame and inoffensive, and it's not like I'm never snarky. Once upon a time, but not for several years....

More taxes and less benefits is what we need, and while that may be politically dubious, it's what Obama insisted he'd get if it cost him re-election; caving on that ultimatum isn't hardball at all, and he does deserve (and is getting) the blame for that. I thought he'd learned from the healthcare debate that that kind of "negotiation" doesn't win him friends on the right (because nothing will) it just enrages his base and convinces independents he's incapable of hard choices, complex policy initiatives or real leadership. As far as accomplishing his stated (and abandoned) goals with a 2010 budget when he had the votes, I completely agree, but that's symptomatic of how useless Senate Democrats are: Remember, as late as September Reids master plan for midterm victory was to propose ending the upper class tax cuts but keeping the middle class tax cuts and make Republicans defend their insistence on keeping both. To say he screwed the pooch would be generous.

As a result those same scumbag moderates brokered this ineffectual deal that ignores revenue shortfalls and spending excesses; again I say, Obama didn't just punt, he took a safety to avoid punting out of his end zone, which would be fine if the country didn't have such a huge deficit already. I expect he'll pay a high cost for that in 2012, but at this point I'm more worried about what the addition by subtraction victory by default nature of our partisan two party system will mean then. Republicans are likely to repeat the same old mistake of taking the vote of no confidence in Obama as a mandate for more of the supply side plutocracy that put us in this mess, and the public will have already seen that even the Democrats idealistic young outsider with populist liberal rhetoric was just another corporate stooge. When 73% of the country says it wants tax hikes AND spending cuts, and 84% of the country says it doesn't want SS cut, Eric Cantor pledging SS cuts and no tax hikes is just asking for trouble. That would be bad enough but avoidable--IF the Democrats offered more than a purely rhetorical alternative in between more taxpayer handouts to failed businesses. At that point I'm afraid all Hell is going to break loose; we may end up with the Joint Chiefs running the country because Capitol Hill is a burned out ruin, and that's my great fear now: That the refusal of plutocrats on BOTH sides of the aisle to work for the people, combined with how thoroughly they've entrenched a two party system that gives the public no third option, may catstrophially and brutally upset the whole apple cart when the public can no longer survive the Democrats and Republicans shared commitment to a status quo that only benefits 1% of the country. Be honest, man: Do you REALLY think our biggest problem right now is that taxes, at their lowest point since the start of the Cold War, are too high?

Yeah, I've pretty much given up on conversion; I can only see so many far right demagogues indulge their partisan agenda by accusing murdered kids of nazism before I give it up as a lost cause. I can't reason with that, only board up my windows and stay inside. My point was simply that no one on "his side" seems to want to reason with him or the Bachmanns of the world either; I hear you and rt say you don't like her but neither of you ever hesitates to defend her even when she's clearly wrong, and she's still a serious contender for your partys nomination next year. While other liberals are perfectly willing to chide me for overreacting, those are also the only people willing to chide trzaska for the same thing, even in threads he starts by stating our reduced credit rating means Obama should resign. Which is exactly the phenomenon that concerns me: There's plenty of radical extremists on both sides; the difference is yours get nominated, and often elected. As dangerous as an extremist majority is, an extremist minority holding the reins of power is a recipe for disaster, because they won't gently surrender power to the majority they consider traitors, and that majority won't meekly accept a starving police state. Again I would like to point out that the reason the Warren Buffets of FDRs age signed onto the New Deal wasn't because they wanted to give the government more of their wealth, but because they recognized reform as the only way to prevent the brutality and violence Stalin and Hitler brought to Europe. Almost no one seems to recognize that now, and the implications of that are chilling.