There really is a wolf, but it’s not in the sequester–it’s in the unsustainable spending which is creating an unmanageable deficit. But that ‘wolf’ is being ignored–to some extent by both sides of the aisle in Washington.
But back to the President crying ‘wolf.’ Marc Thiessen posted an article at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday entitled, “The president who cried ‘Sequester!’”
Mr. Thiessen points out that so far the biggest damage done by the sequester has been to President Obama’s credibility. The credibility problem began during the final debate with Mitt Romney when President Obama stated, “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” I believe the Washington Post gave the President four pinocchio’s for that statement. The problem with the internet and YouTube is that it is very easy to look up past statements of people in office. The President also stated that the sequester would never happen. Oh well.
The discourse got worse. The sequester would bring plagues and pestilence; the sequester would mean that everything about America we know and love would be gone. The sky would fall, the glaciers would melt, etc. Secretary of education, Arne Duncan, claimed that teachers would get pink slips. Homeland Security began letting criminals out of jail. Children would lose the Head Start Program (which has been proven ineffective anyway). The janitors at the Capitol would take a pay cut. When investigated, all of these claims proved to be false.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the answer given to Charles Brown of Raleigh, North Carolina, (see rightwinggranny.com) when he sent a memo to Washington asking how to implement the budget cuts in sequester. The bottom line of the answer he received was “make the cuts as painful to the public as possible.”
The posturing by the President and the Democrat Party on the sequester is not only bad politics, it is bad for the country. Can we please re-open the debate on term limits for Congress? That is probably not the total answer, but it would be a start.
