Republicans Spooked by NBC Poll, Ready to Cut a Deal For Like Whatever, Man

Well, we always knew they were ready to fold. They didn't want to do this in the first place.

Which is why I asked a couple of weeks ago, "Why bother doing this if they've already pre-announced their strong desire to fold at the first possible opportunity?"

You can't really bluff after you've tossed in your cards. You can't grab them back and start pretending you have pocket kings. (Well I guess you could do this if you really had pocket kings, but we know the GOP doesn't.)

So I guess the hope was "polling will show a less painful public response than feared" and that will give politicians some "backbone." * Which it really wouldn't be. Backbone, you know. Backbone is what you have when things look bad, not when they look okay.

But we didn't get that break. An NBC poll looks bad for Republicans, so that's all she wrote.

Republican demands that Barack Obama cut funding for or delay his healthcare law – a deal-breaker for Democrats – now appear to be off the table. The discussions include trimming health benefits for wealthier elderly Americans and easing the across-the-board cuts in spending forced on defence and other departments in a previous budget accord.

However, the shape of any agreement remains unclear...

As Drew noted in an email, the Republican plan is now to take ObamaCare off the table, and then trim Medicare benefits for older voters (majority Republican constituents) in order to ease the pain for government workers (huge majority Democratic constituents).

Well then! I guess I do now understand how things could be much worse after a Shutdown. Apparently we'll now be paying for the privilege of surrendering.

* I'd also hoped that the clear demonstrations of Obama's bad faith and malicious intent on the shutdown might galvanize the party, now that the real villains were revealed to not be Ted Cruz and Mike Lee after all.

But no such luck on that account.

Do these people read anything apart from NBCNews?

Oh! And Now We Can Turn Again To Other Leftist Action Items. Now that this distraction's done with, we can get down to some serious legislatin'.

posted by Ace at 06:47 PM

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