More on the Budget Deal

Jeff Goldstein wants to know:

What about principles? What about doing what you were elected by your constituency — including those who make over $450K — elected you to do as their representative? Instead, it became a numbers game: who can we sacrifice to appear “reasonable” by the Marxist rules set by the New Left and the media. A losing battle, as I’ve long pointed out — and one that has become something of a point of stasis and surreal refrain. Which is precisely why many of us simply can’t believe any longer that the GOP is acting either in good faith or in our interests as its base.

The truth is, the media is always going to have the power to paint the GOP as the villain, precisely because we don’t do anything at all to neutralize that power. And yet, that’s beside the point in this instance: as I noted in an earlier post, the GOP is still to be blamed for bringing us so near the phony “fiscal cliff” — only now, a guy taking a tax-payer funded 20 day Hawaiian vacation gets credit for “tax cuts for the middle class” that were actually tax rate decreases pushed by Republicans and voted against by Reid, and Schumer, and Biden back when they were first enacted.

As I wrote yesterday, Obama got exactly what he needed: GOP fingerprints on a deal that won’t lead to a recovery. Blaming Bush was getting stale, but now he has Boehner to blame.

Then again, so do we.