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Kasich Backs Obama Economic Plans

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on July 13, 2011.

07-13-2011 by Linda S. Carbonell

Ohio Gov. John Kasich

Somedays, Republicans manage to make themselves look really, really hypocritical. This was one of those days.

Ohio Governor John Kasich was on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning, talking about his budget (draconian), his union busting (a cop ticked him off once) and his ideas for economic recovery. He advocated removing special interest tax breaks and loopholes in exchange for lowering our tax rates. He believes in investment in industry to create jobs. Kasich is very much like Pat Buchanan, a regular on the show. Everything is emphatic, decibel levels high, demeanor almost frantic. Buchanan weighed in as agreeing with Kasich, calling it conservative economic principles.

Excuse me? “Conservative economic principles”? So, why is it that those are exactly the things that President Obama was pushing in his State of the Union Address, and has brought up during these deficit negotiations?

Welcome to the conundrum of the Republican Party. They actually share many of President Obama’s positions, but hell will move to the North Pole before they ever acknowledge that they even know that President Obama thinks that way. These are THEIR ideas. That socialist/marxist/maoist/commie/Muslim can’t possibly have the same ideas. It’s like the insurance exchanges in the health care law. As soon as they were introduced for the Democratic Party’s and the President’s health care law, they were no longer ideas that the Republicans had advocated for years.

It’s amazing. These guys seem to think that when they get in front of a microphone, they are speaking only to Fox News. They don’t seem to understand that they are making these statements in front of audiences who actually have heard the President say the same things. John Boehner is the most guilty of this. He’ll come out and say the President hasn’t made any offers or doesn’t have a budget or has no plan, and the people who hear him (except on Fox) know that the President presented his budget in March, has made appalling concessions in these negotiations and laid out his plans in January.

One has to wonder if they really believe the stuff they say or if they are like those old Chatty Cathy dolls, pull the string and they spout the same phrases over and over again. They and their media cohorts have rewritten history to the point where anyone with a search engine and five brain cells, or a good memory, knows that everything they are saying is a distortion or an outright lie. Lowering taxes does not create jobs. Raising taxes does not kill economic growth. And the Republicans do own the economic crisis, thanks to Bush quadrupling the national debt, after Reagan doubled it. .

There is a famous quote, attributed both to Abraham Lincoln and P. T. Barnum. “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.” The one thing we have learned in the past few years is who makes up that second group – the ones who can be fooled all the time. They watch Fox News and listen to right wing radio. The rest of us are just scratching our heads every time we hear this total disconnect between reality and Republican fantasyland.