And the Phrase of the Day is...

…“Selective Shutdown,” Hugh Hewitt writes in the Washington Examiner:

Boehner needs to be explaining now that, absent the president’s embrace of the necessary fiscal restraint, the repeal of Obamacare and a reigning in of EPA, the non-necessary functions of the federal government will be closing down in the fall.

Boehner needs to start talking now about the “selective shutdown” of the federal government that is ahead if the president refuses to listen to the verdict of the voters rendered decisively in November.

At the same time, Boehner and his allies have to reassure Americans and especially senior citizens that they have provided the Senate with the bills necessary to fund Social Security, Medicare and defense, but that the president is holding these appropriations hostage in order to defend Obamacare,the bureaucrats at EPA and the leftwing broadcasters at NPR.

Again and again and again, Boehner and his team must make this reality clear: The looming shutdown of the government need only be selective and that it, too, could be avoided if the president would only do what the voters demanded he do.

Obama and his faithful allies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will repeat all the talking points from the Clinton-Gingrich era, but then the GOP got worked and was flat-footed, ill-prepared and without alternative means of communicating with the public about the issues and the stakes involved for the future of the country.

Forewarned is forearmed, and if the public is briefed again and again on the GOP’s intention to keep the crucial parts of the government running, while allowing the shutdown of the EPA, the Departments of Education, Labor and Interior and various parts of Health and Human Services (not Medicare, not the center for Disease Control, not the Food and Drug Administration) the public will not only support the move, they will cheer it.

The key, as always, is preparation of the political battlefield now. The sooner the lines over spending are drawn and the genuine disagreements laid out, the sooner the public can weigh in.

Yes, it’s a new era, and yes, there’s plenty of alternative media, and yes, as we’ve seen this past week when the public wasn’t suckered by the New York Times and the rest of the left’s fascistic spin on the shooting in Tucson, it’s possible to break the logjam of the MSM. But does the House GOP have anywhere near the discipline and communications skills possible to pull off what Hugh’s suggesting in his article?

In other words, how quickly before the GOP Congress gets played by the White House and old media, loses their nerve, and wimps out once again?

(On the other hand, “Holding the Republican House to its commitments is one thing; falling for Operation Demoralize is something else.”)