Sen. Pat Toomey, you’re evidently a very naive man. A good man, but also naive. That’s an endearing quality, honestly, but it may dent your effectiveness in that town you work in. Suggestions like this sound great — are great — but like using your turn signal on the DC Beltway, they end up just being interpreted as a sign of weakness.
Toomey, speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, questioned what President Obama has actually put on the table in terms of entitlement reform, or any other part of the negotiations. “We hear about reforms, but what are the reforms?” Toomey said. “Here are the problems. We have five guys in a room behind closed doors. Who knows what they are talking about. This should be done out in the open. We ought to have a budget. We ought to have votes on the Senate floor. We ought to have a debate.”
Sen. Toomey is unarguably right. We’re a representative republic; we elected the scoundrels who are waging pitched battles over our economic future, so we have a right to see who is saying what in these debates. Heck, Obama’s “don’t call my bluff” would make a great autotune moment if we had the footage. But we don’t. We should.
But never mind all that. Remember this?
That’s a compilation of Barack Obama’s promises to hold the health care negotiations in public, on CSPAN. He broke that promise at the speed of a corporate jet, despite have made it on camera in front of the entire world numerous times. Does anyone think he will now submit to negotiations in public? A day after he stormed out of talking with Eric Cantor?
If you think that’s going to happen, Aerosmith has a song for you:
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