Social Security To Be Sacrificed On The Alter Of Preserving Tax Cuts For The Wealthy?

Broderism writ large

David Broder, execrable "dean" of the painfully hackish Inside-the-Beltway press corps, and always a cheerleader for every bad idea that has ever come down the pike-- especially lower taxes for the rich and pointless wars in far-off places-- has the top story for tomorrow's talking heads to obsess over on TV: a specious claim that the nation-- he means The Village-- is now ready for the Republican Party's biggest goals since the 1930s: gutting Social Security and Medicare. The nation is ready to destroy the two most popular government programs to guarantee that the top 1% of wealth holders become even richer? Sure, just ask a gaggle of conservative, backward politicians whose careers are financed by those same wealthy folks they're trying to help out by destroying the middle class-- Judd Gregg (R-NH), Ken Conrad (D-ND), Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN). And Steny Hoyer (D-MD).

Conrad and Gregg have proposed attacking that larger problem by creating a bipartisan commission to examine the big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- where savings must be found, and the tax systems that support them.

To Broder, Hoyer is "courageous" because he stabbed Nancy Pelosi-- a defender of the middle class-- in the back and joined with the fiscal conservatives to put Social Security on the table. To Broder all of these scourges of the middle class are heroes. It would never cross his mind that the root solution to the problems he writes about is campaign finance laws that end the universal, bipartisan corruption that leads to ultimate power over our democracy-for-sale by the wealthiest whose congressional shills are at their beck and call. We expect that from the Republican Party; that, after all, is their entire raison d'être. But what a betrayal to the values of grassroots Democrats who still believe in a Democratic Party that extols the virtues of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, to watch reactionary Democrats-- Blue Dogs like Cooper as well as the Evan Bayh anti-Obama Bloc in the Senate-- morph into de facto Republicans!

More and more individual Democrats and Republicans are expressing a readiness for such an effort. In response to Hoyer's speech, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who traveled the country last year with John McCain, told my Washington Post colleague, Lori Montgomery, "I think we can get double-digit Republican support for a reasonable compromise."

As if to confirm his words, Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio and independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut introduced an entitlement commission bill of their own last week. Voinovich told me that he thinks "the prospects for action on the issue are very, very good, because the feeling is growing that we can't sustain the path we're on."

No wonder Broder put everything he had on electing John McCain! Maybe he doesn't realize that McCain only won in the most backward parts of the country, the Old Confederacy (minus forward-looking North Carolina, Virginia and Florida), the Mormon West and a few of the less populated Midwestern states where people get their political information from Hate Talk Radio. In any case, President Obama is determined to carry out his own program, not, amazingly, McCain's and Broder's. Guaranteeing more tax cuts for the wealthy isn't what the American people had in mind when they rejected McCain, rejected congressional Republicans and rejected the ideas espoused by Broder and his "courageous" sell-outs. Obama wants to push through health care reform and energy reform, but to Broder these ideas pail in comparison to cementing in place a plutocratic version of Democracy that harkens back to pre-Revolutionary France.

And Americans? I think we'd rather see the president and Congress working on reining in the banksters and the angry, self-entitled rich people who would prefer to see the rest of us eating pet food than give up an increasingly regressive tax system that favors the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, or even their off shore tax havens, their outrageously low estate tax rates, their rip-off schemes that impoverish almost every middle class kid going to college, their thousands of little tricks that enshrine usury as the accepted business practice of this country-- while paying lip service to Jesus Christ's message, the very same Jesus Christ who talked an awful lot about the plight of the poor but never mentioned anything about opposing gays or spreading bigotry or empowering capital. One can only hope that David Broder's song to faux courageousness is the death rattle of the dominance of society's pariah class, the ones all his repulsive punditry has always been aimed at pleasing.