Jed Babbin
The American Spectator
5/31/2011
“A lie can travel halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” as then British Prime Minister Callaghan said in 1976. Callaghan was, of course, a Labour PM and thus knew first-hand how political falsehoods work. I don’t know what kind of boots Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions wears, but he got them on fast enough to enable Senate Republicans to catch up with the Democrats’ budgetary misinformation and carry some important truths past them.
A few of Sessions’ truths are matters of the calendar and arithmetic: it’s been more than 760 days since the Democratic Senate passed a budget. In that time, the Obama gang and its congressional accomplices have spent about $7.1 trillion, our national debt has grown by more than $3.2 trillion, and the legal limit on government borrowing — $14,294,000,000,000 — has been reached.
The borrowed money runs out on about August 2. So if the Senate Dems don’t pass a budget or don’t get enough Republican votes to raise the debt ceiling our government would, the Dems say, default on its obligations and all economic hell would break loose. (That is Dem disinformation, as an April 27 Congressional Research Service report explains.)
Republicans have been consumed in the defense of the House-passed Paul Ryan budget, which would cut government spending by about $4 trillion over the next decade. The Democrats opposed every point in Ryan’s plan. The Dems’ “Mediscare” disinformation campaign was enough to attract five Senate RINOs to help defeat the Ryan plan in the Senate and win a special election in NY-26. They insist, falsely, that Ryan’s plan would convert Medicare into a voucher system.
The Senate Democrats’ strategy is delay. Borrowing President Obama’s (so far) successful strategy of delaying tough choices (on the budget, Iraq, Afghanistan and just about everything else) until 2013, the Senate Dems have refused to propose a budget or make any serious move to negotiate cost cuts to gain Republican votes on increasing the debt ceiling.
Even the New York Times and the Washington Post condemn the Dems’ stalling tactics…
The article continues at The American Spectator.
Related: Debt Ceiling: “Clean” Debt Ceiling Vote Fails 318-97
