To call President Obama's response to last week's horrendous jobs report inadequate would be a gross understatement. Here's what the president should have said.
Mitch McConnell's debt ceiling compromise allows Republicans to vote against raising the debt limit without bearing the horrendous consequences of a government default. And now the GOP will try to paint 2012 as a referendum on Obama's "big government."
Government-haters seem to be everywhere. Congressional Republicans, now led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, hate government so much they're ready to sacrifice the full faith and credit of the United States in order to shrink it.
The GOP's experienced actors -- House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McDonnell -- have been upstaged by juveniles like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, who don't know the difference between playacting and governing.
The sad lesson of Dodd-Frank is that Wall Street is too powerful to allow effective regulation of it. The only answer left is to break up the giant banks with antitrust action.
Republicans are proposing to cut the budget deficit this year and next, which will result in more job losses. And Democrats, from the president on down, seem unable or unwilling to present a bold jobs plan to reverse the vicious cycle of unemployment.
If Standard & Poor's had been doing the job it was supposed to be doing between 2000 and 2008, the federal budget wouldn't be in a crisis -- and S&P wouldn't be threatening the U.S. with a downgrade if we didn't come up with a credible plan for lopping $4 trillion off it.
That we're calling the current debate in Washington a "budget crisis" and worrying that if we don't "solve" it we can't pay our nation's bills is testament to how successful deficit hawks have been distorting the truth.
How did we get into this mess? Part of the answer lies with the president -- and his inability or unwillingness to use the bully pulpit to tell Americans the truth, and mobilize them for what must be done.
