“GOP Leaders Wield Unlikely Weapon Against Obama: Bob Woodward,” Eliana Johnson writes at the Corner:
Republicans Friday afternoon bludgeoned the administration with an unlikely weapon in the political battle over the impending sequestration: the words of Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist whose exposure of the Watergate scandal in 1972 brought down the Nixon presidency.
As White House press secretary Jay Carney blasted “spin doctors on the Republican side” for spreading the “fanciful concoction” that the White House wanted the sequester, House Republicans deployed a passage from Woodward’s most recent book, The Price of Politics, that tells a different story. According to Woodward, it was then–White House chief of staff Jack Lew who introduced the idea of sequestration into the debt-ceiling negotiations that consumed Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2011. “Reid bent down and put his head between his knees, almost as if he were going to throw up,” Woodward writes.
Click to enlarge.
That, according to both Woodward and Republican lawmakers, is how President Obama strong-armed sequestration into the Budget Control Act of 2011, and why the president today bears responsibility for finding a way out of the problem he created.
Oh, and speaking of Lew, “Jack Lew, President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary nominee, previously held up to $100,000 in investments in an offshore hedge fund located in the Cayman Islands, according to financial disclosure forms,” according to NBC. But even so, I’m willing to believe the network on this story.
Though as Glenn Reynolds quips, “Hey, the campaign’s over. You’re not supposed to take that stuff seriously. It’s just for the rubes!”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member