The Dumbest Thing Said In Washington Today

The Dumbest Thing Said In Washington Today by John Hinderaker

We linked earlier to this Politico story using our “Picks” feature–which, by the way, we hope you have discovered and found useful. Most attention has gone to Politico’s report that Joe Biden compared Tea Partiers to “terrorists,” but that wasn’t the dumbest thing anyone said in Washington today. That was just the desperate hysteria that we see from Democrats every day.

No, the dumbest thing followed just after in Politico’s story:
“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry [Congressman Mike] Doyle [D-Pa.] said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

“Impossible to spend any money?” This fiscal year, the federal government is spending $3.8 trillion. It is a curious feature of the debt deal that there is no way to know how much money the government will spend in FY 2012, but it is almost certain to be significantly more than this year’s figure. And the only solid “cuts” in the debt deal add up to $7 billion–a small fraction of the planned increase in spending between FY 2011 and FY 2012.

In what world does a budget of $4 trillion–no, wait, that’s not right, the government doesn’t even have a budget–mean that it is “impossible to spend any money?” Only in the parallel universe of Washington, D.C., where a doubling of federal spending since 2002 means that we are not “spending any money.”

Have there ever been politicians in Washington as out of touch with the American people as today’s Democrats?

UPDATE: A little while ago, a liberal host on CNN tried to get Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, to say something bad about the Tea Party. Sessions’ response, as tweeted moments ago:

Tea Party have been called ‘terrorists’; I would just say they put some terror in the hearts of the big spenders.

Sessions has announced that he will not vote for the debt ceiling bill, I suspect mostly as a protest at the ongoing circumvention of the statutory budget process. One of the diabolical aspects of the debt bill is that budgets for FY 2012 and 2013 will be “deemed” to be in effect, even though in fact, no budget will be proposed, reviewed in committee, debated or adopted. Will that make President Obama the first chief executive to serve an entire term without ever having a budget in place?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/08/the-dumbest-thing-said-in-washington-today.php