The New Chickenhawks

Yesterday’s “Chickenhawks” were Republicans who dodged the draft during Vietnam and then screamed for war in Afghanistan and Iraq so they could send someone else’s children to be maimed and killed in foreign wars.

Today’s “Chickenhawks” are Democrats who sat in the halls of Congress for four full years pretending that the Bush tax cuts were never going to expire right up until the month that they did so, leaving it to the President to do something about that because the buck does stop with him whether he says so or not. Now they have the unmitigated gall to criticize him for the solution he came up with, after four full years of not even attempting any kind of solution on their own.

They put their President out on the end of the limb and took a saw to it, and now are complaining about the noise it made when he and the sawed-off limb hit the ground.

No, Obama didn’t handle this all that well, but he handled it, which is a lot more than those scrawny-necked clucking pecker heads in the Democrat Congress did. They were too busy running around in the chicken coop scratching in the dirt and running for the fences screaming that the sky was falling every time a plane flew over.

I can live with his solution, it may be the best solution available, and to the degree that is a bad solution the fault lies with Congress far more than with Obama. That being said, I may have problems with what he does in the next couple of years in light of this solution.

Is he really going to come to us in the State of the Union and talk to us about deficit reduction after he crafted a tax cut deal, not a stimulus package but a tax cut deal, that added $900 billion to the deficit in the next two years? Is he really going to approve two more years of tax cuts for the wealthy and then suggest cuts to Social Security in the name of “fiscal responsibility” just one or two months later?

The cut to Social Security revenue is completely out of left field, and was not in any discussion that anyone knew about. Was it a necessary part of this deal? It cuts revenue to a program that was already being discussed as having future revenue problems. Is he going to come to us at some point and say that we have to cut Social Security benefits because the revenue shortfall demands it after he himself, in part, created that shortfall?

This could be his edition of “Read my lips, no new taxes.” There was nothing equivocal about his stance on the Bush tax cuts. He said that “We cannot afford four more years of the Bush-McCain economic policy,” and with this deal he has cemented four more years of the Bush-McCain economic policy that were not forced on him by Congress but were negotiated by him.

Come 2012, this is going to play a far larger role than any legislation that got passed.