Allow me to quote myself from January 22, 2011, building on other posts dating back to December, 2010:
Just watch the circus as it unfolds. Watch the ignorant teabaggers haul weapons into Congress and introduce insane and stupid bills which will become the bread and butter of the media. Watch this annoyingly moderate President start skewering the Republicans on every single 70-30 issue there is, from health care to taxes to benefits packages.
Here's how I know it's going to happen: because it already has happened. The taxes for the rich issue? That one is already in the bag. The Republicans held our taxes hostage for a vanishingly small 3% of the population that counts for all of the money, but practically none of the votes. The Republicans cannot redeem themselves, because the Democrats in the Senate control when a saving vote for the Republican Senators will come, and that will be FUCKING NEVER.
Elsewhere I pointed out that the smart play would be to split the Bush tax cuts into two bills, one for the rich and one for everyone else. That will force Senate Republicans to vote against the highly popular middle-class tax cut in order to hold them hostage for rich peoples' tax cuts. The alternative is pointed out in my quote above: that Senate Dems can keep any vote at all on tax cut extensions off the table, forcing Republican Senators to defend their party-line vote against the middle class tax cuts in 2010.
President Obama thought it out rather better than I did, and has instead begun floating the idea of a tax hike for the rich through the "Buffet Rule," leaving the Bush tax cut extensions aside for the moment. Republicans will have to vote against this idea first, and then we can fire the middle-class clay pigeon and watch the GOP shoot itself in the foot on that.
Slowly but inexorably, this brilliant President and Democratic planners in Congress have managed to publicly box Republicans into the issues they privately support in practice, but which they know are electoral poison: stacking the deck for the rich, hating women and minorities, thumping a social agenda that would have been execrable a hundred years ago, and so on.
Now that they are trapped, hissing and foaming at the mouth, it's time to poke them with a stick for awhile so that everyone can see for sure that Republicans are rabid.
How did I know all this way back then? I did something no Republican has done in a very long time: I actually read the legislation they passed and as a result I was able to predict how it would work. For free, while Republican legislative analysts are making $100K a year to play Angry Birds.
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