On Friday's Diane Rehm Show distributed across America by NPR, the host could not stand Republicans getting praised -- the Paul Ryan budget to be precise.
Doyle McManus, a columnist and former Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, acknowledged, "this is a huge, ambitious, bold budget that would restructure the tax system. It would lower the top tax rate to 25 percent. That would be a great gift to upper-income families...You have to give Republicans credit for doubling down, sticking to their guns and sticking to the Tea Party government-cutting and deficit-cutting proposals that they made two years ago in the face of a lot of public skepticism." Diane Rehm wasn't having it:
She said: "But, clearly, as Ron Elving said, it's going nowhere?" McManus acknowledged it was dead-on-arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But Rehm didn't acknowledge the Senate wouldn't offer a budget. She denounced Ryan for wasting "precious time" on his spending-cut proposals.
"You know what I don't understand, frankly, is that everybody knew it was not going to go anywhere in the Senate. Why waste what precious time there is to pass a bill like this?"
This is not a question. It's a denunciation. Nia-Malika Henderson of The Washington Post calmly explained they're putting down their markers for limiting spending in an election year, and Ron Elving (the political director for NPR) explained for supposedly uneducated Rehm that this is the Tea Party agenda that elected Republicans in 2010:
This is a Republican majority in the House. Unlike the House Republicans we have seen in the past, they are not focused in an election year on independence. They're focused on their own party base. They're focused on, in some cases, people who may still be voting on them or against them in a Republican primary. But even beyond that, and on a philosophical-ideological basis, these are people who came to Washington with a mission, particularly the 80-some Republicans who were elected as freshman in November of 2010.
What they'll campaign on is cutting spending, just spending. They'll say, we're going to restrict the federal government. We're going to make it a smaller part of your life, and we're going to give you more personal liberty as a result. And the rest of the details, well, we won't worry about that.
It's sort of like "wasting precious time" talking about denying taxpayer subsidies to NPR. Diane Rehm's Friday "news roundups" with journalists are often tidy summaries from three liberal-elite journalists summing up the week's liberal "conventional wisdom," and when that "wisdom" gives a little too much credit to conservatives, Rehm slams the door.
