Obama Showed "Incredible Arrogance" Ridiculing Congress At Press Conference
I found it astonishing. Here he is -- coming out to speak to the nation at a crucial moment -- in very delicate negotiations and he comes out there with incredible arrogance. He ridicules the Congress, he spikes the football on the Republicans. He rubs in the fact that they were resisting a raise in rates and he made them do it. And of course, as always, he places himself hovering benignly at an Olympian level above the fray, where the children are playing in the sand box and he's asking that everybody be reasonable as if he just arrived in Washington on a tourist visa.
And then he goes into detail. What he basically says, 'I'm giving the Republicans zero on spending. And I mean zero, not even discretionary spending. This is after he killed a proposal from the Minority Leader in the Senate for the tiniest of changes in entitlements, change in the cost of living index, which is essentially a technical change. So that's rejected out of hand. So he's saying tax hikes all in rates, no cuts in spending. And worse than that, after all of this is done, after I shoved all this down your throats, when we negotiate later for spending cuts -- which Republicans imagine they're going to get -- no, it's not going to happen that way.
If there are going to be any spending cuts in the future, there's going to have to be an increase -- a further increase in taxes on the rich, of course, it's always the millionaires that will balance out those spending cuts. So, he laid out a radically oppositionist position, gleefully. I think he wants to go over the cliff and dare the Republicans to take the blame. (Special Report, December 31, 2012)
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