The Lesser Evil and his “balanced” approach to a Grand Bargain

QOTD: President Obama

Digby’s paraphrase of what the president has been saying and her explanation of “balanced.”

“We need to cut programs that are ‘really important to seniors, student and so forth,’ but we also need to get some chump change from millionaires who won't even miss the money.”

That's what "balanced" really means.

Oh, as Krugman has said, it isn’t so much a Grand Bargain as a Grand Scam, anyway.

And that would be a Grand Scam involving a Democratic president doing the Republican Party’s dirty work for them undermining Social Security and Medicare and thereby helping the Democrats become a second neoliberal party differing from the first mostly by being secular and sociolib rather than clericalist and sociocon.

Which is pretty much what people like Booman have said he and the Democrats ought to do, anyway, under cover of urging the party to dump “exurban and rural whites” for their unforgivable racism, or more frankly to dump the white working class altogether for its unforgivable racism.

And what feminists have been urging as a matter of disempowering that especially hateful class of white male bastards with whom they have been so at war for so long.

Liberals generally, for that matter, have for quite a while been describing the significant contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans in sexual and racial terms rather than class terms.

The Republicans, according to them, are the party of white males standing for the power of white males.

The Democrats are the party of everybody else and stand for empowerment of everybody else.

As if the Democrats could dump the white working class without just dumping the working class, regardless of color, and thus doing about as much harm as it possibly could to the vast majority of the non-whites of America in the name of an “eeeuuuu” reaction to the icky racism of those icky Archie Bunker white people.

And in the name of feminist man-hating.

Booman, by the way, has gone public as being little more, really, than an equal-opportunity liberal of the hand-wringing rather than the fighting kind who will be glad to hold the president’s coat as he surrenders round after round in his fake boxing match with the Republicans.

PS. TPM last evening reported the Republicans have given up their demands for cuts in Social Security because the Democrats in Congress would not allow them. No mention of Medicare.

Here’s Robert Reich.

Obama's Unwise, Unnecessary Concessions