After dragging this country through days of brinkmanship and fear, John Boehner and Congress have earned the wrath of the American people. Worldwide financial markets are reacting to the reckless, disastrous blackmail the Tea Party foisted upon America. How's your portfolio doing today?
You can thank the Republican Party for not kicking the TPs juvenile asses to the curb for this unprecedented hijacking of our national debate. Americans are angry, and their anger is directed at the GOP.
President Obama's numbers, OTOH, are holding steady.
Today's GOP is not just the Party of NO! it's the party of "Let's Keep the Kenyan Commie Marxist Socialist Guy to One Term by Destroying America!" They believe in burning down the country in order to save it.
Remember that when you vote in 2012.
NYTimes/CBS Poll:
Well, Congress has done it. It's hit its highest disapproval ratings since the New York Times/CBS News poll was created in 1977. In the wake of the debt debate, a full 82% of Americans are displeased with the legislative branch, with only 14% approval.
It's not so much the deal that was struck on the debt ceiling increase, which Americans were split on: 46% actually approved of the deal versus 45%. It was the perceived motivations that have people upset. 82% of the poll's respondents said that disagreements between parties on the debt ceiling debate were due to "gaining political advantage," rather than "doing what's best for the country," which only 14% saw as the motivator for Congress. Those numbers perfectly mirrored the general Congressional ratings.
As was the case with other polling around the debt deal, some individual political leaders have taken a hit. In this case, House Speaker John Boehner's disapproval rating went from 42% in April of this year to 57% now, while his national approval rating only went from 32% to 30%. President Obama saw a slight increase in his disapproval rating over that time as well, from 45% to the current 47%, but his approval went from 46% to 48%.
In the end, the poll really shows that Congress, having never really been that popular individually, is reaching new lows. The percentage of respondents to the poll that thought this is either "dissatisfied" or "angry" with Washington was 84.
h/t Talking Points Memo
7 comments:
A point of clarification on your poll numbers. We "extremists" over here on the right are just as pissed with Congress and Boehner as you are, but not because he kowtowed to us.
It's because, despite all your screaming about "extreme" crap, the two parties made a deal that does almost nothing and will be wiped out of existence in subsequent years.
Of course, if you wanted to discuss spending cuts rather than just attacking people who are putting ideas on the table (whether you like them or not), then maybe the politicians on the right you blast on a daily basis and the bunch on the left you give a pass to as a result, wouldn't be getting away with crap deals such as this.
If the Tea Party was serious about spending cuts, they would have made the fight over the Defense budget which was new spending rather than the debt ceiling which was old spending (just paying our bills that have come due).
Ditto Jerry. And I'd just like to add that John Boehner and other GOP members are paying the price for courting the TP terrorists in the first place. I am not a conservative but that doesn't mean all Republicans are necessarily bad but they sure seem to have lost all sense of decency, honor and good sense over the last couple of years. When you get in bed with the devil, you're liable to get poked in the ass. History has shown that the great majority of people are not comfortable with extremes on either side.
patrickmspeaks said...
>>Of course, if you wanted to discuss spending cuts....
Good idea, let's talk about spending cuts.
The deficits of 2009and 2010 were caused by: decreased revenue from Bus's tax cuts; decreased revenue from Bush's recession, the hundreds of dollars spent on Bush's wars, Bush's TARP program to rescue the banks who brought calamity on themselves by reckless derivatives activities made possible by the GOP anti-regulation stance, and the one time Stimulus package (which lead to the one period of rapid job growth during its short life that we have seen since the Clinton admin.) (We'll leave aside Bush's trillion dollar give away to big pharma in Medicare Plan D.)
Re spending cuts. They mean even more job losses (on top of the 1/2 million lost public sector jobs from GOP anti-government5 policies.)
Spending cuts are the exact opposite of what we need in a weak economy.
Let's go to the video tape (or hope into Mr Sherman's "Way Back" machine) to the year 1936.
Roosevelt is in a re-election fight. The Republicans have been screaming about deficit spending.
So Roosevelt agrees to an austerity package to enhance his re-election chances. (Sound familiar?)
The country's economic recovery reverses and we go into the 37 recession.
Do you suppose history might repeat itself?
Yeah. let's talk about spending cuts and even more job losses.
I think the main reason the GOP isn't crowing about how much they won in this debate is that if they acknowledge it, when the economy takes another dive, the more they've crowed, the more people will realize their "austerity program" is responsible.
RJW-Progressive,
Thank you for enlightening my friend Patrick.
He and his libertarian friends seem not to care about what got us here, nor how history shows that cutting spending during a deep recession is not the way to help the economy.
And Patrick, I stand by my assessment of the TP as out-of-control extremists. They care nothing for their fellow Americans, their allegience is to some inept writer who believed in greed as an American value.
Plenty of ideas have been put on the table. You fail to recognize them because you don't like them.
PS. Patrick, take a look at the stock market and how it has behaved after the mugging we received from the Tea Party.
Yep. We just lost our triple A rating - for the first time in this nation's history. : (
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