On Special Report last night, Bret Baier asked his guest, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, some fairly predictable questions on budgeting. Carney, for his part, offered up more spin than Tara Lipinski on a merry-go-round, somehow blaming the Senate Democrat majority's failure on...the Republicans? If you can stomach three minutes of the PressSec's smug hipster-ness (it's those unfortunate glasses), then by all means:
Ah, yes. Bipartisanship, the alter upon which our president makes daily sacrifice, usually of Republican lawmakers. Indeed, Carney says that it's Paul Ryan's fault that we've had no budget make it through the Senate. And look at the moderate tack he's adopting here, just in time for the election: we Democrats don't want to jam something through on party lines. We've been waiting for the Republicans to cooperate with us so we can pass something we all like!
Simply false. The system is such that a Democrat Senate can pass a proposal, and a Republican House can pass its own, and in the end, a committee will reconcile the two to make everyone as happy as possible.
Besides, taking lots of time to build a massive, bipartisan coalition in the Senate didn't matter when healthcare was on the line. Then, President Obama was perfectly happy to sign a bill that passed the upper chamber strictly along party lines. Bipartisanship is such a massively convenient, falsely centrist excuse for the real problem: the Democrats are perfectly happy spending away, with no plan and no constraint.
