Associate Editor of the Washington Post Bob Woodward speaks at the Newseum during an event marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate at the Newseum in Washington, DC June 13, 2012. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/GettyImages)
28 February 13
ob
Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter turned reliable chronicler
of insider accounts of political events, has made a series of bizarre
assertions over the past week.
It started with Woodward's odd weekend assertion that the White House is trying "to move the goalposts"
by replacing sequestration with a deficit reduction package that
includes tax hikes. The idea of sequestration was always that it was
something elected officials were going to want to replace with
alternative deficit reduction. Republicans have been trying to replace
it with a package of cuts targeted at income support programs for the
poor. Obama's been trying to replace it with a mixture of spending cuts
and tax hikes. Either everyone's moving the goalposts (which I think is
tendentious but even-handed) or no one is moving them. But it really
intensified Wednesday morning when Woodward went on Morning Joe to suggest it's crazy of Obama to be applying the law as written to the military, instead of simply ignoring it.
Things moved into the absurd Wednesday night when it
was revealed that National Economic Council director Gene Sperling had
concluded an email disagreement with Woodward with the observation that
in Sperling's view Woodward would come to regret clinging so tenaciously
to an untenable position.
As if determined to prove Sperling right, Woodward chose to start talking around town about how Sperling had threatened him
- a ridiculous interpretation that the ridiculous conservative media
has been running with - rather than sticking with the obvious
interpretation that Woodward's reputation among journalists is going to
suffer from flagrant wrongness. It would be interesting to see Woodward
try to hash this out with, say, fellow Post-ie Ezra Klein, but instead he's going the full wingnut and will be appearing on Sean Hannity's show Thursday night to advance the agitprop agenda. In retrospect, this whole affair was foreshadowed by the release of Woodward's latest book last fall. It made much less of a splash than many other Woodward books. Most well-informed observers agreed with Noam Scheiber that it was marred by anti-Obama bias,
but under the circumstances of the time, it didn't get the right geared
up either. By essentially doubling down on the worst qualities of that
book, Woodward has managed to make himself the center of attention
again.
But none of this changes the fact that we are facing
cuts in government spending that are projected to harm the economy in
the short term without doing anything to improve the long-term budget
picture. The White House wants to replace those cuts with a balanced
package of spending cuts and tax hikes. Republicans are insisting on an
all-cuts package. It's not a very complicated debate. It just happens to
be that the Democratic position is much more popular than the
Republican position, so clear statements of what's happening tend to put
the GOP at a disadvantage. Woodward's epic week of attention-grabbing
tends to obscure the underlying clear issue - are all cuts and no tax
hikes better, or is a mix of cuts and tax hikes better?
1 comment:
Ever notice how none of these cuts ever seem to affect the handouts? The entitlements? The free phones? The "green energy" corporate tax-breaks for companies that go bankrupt with astonishing regularity? Nope, just the children, airline safety, military families, medical research facilities.
And almost no one is pointing out that the 2013 tax hikes demanded by Obama are over $150 billion - twice the sequester tax cuts ($85 billion). Where is that money going? Manufactured crisis? Manufactured by Obama and the democrats as no one in the media seems to be willing to point out.
Post a Comment