What is the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform?

It is the brainchild of Obama and the Democrats. Soon enough we'll be aswim in tall tales from unthinking Obamaheads and other apologists for the Democrats that will try to persuade us that the punishing budget cuts on the table are the sole work of Republcians. Don't believe it.

This commission, let us call it the "Deficit Commission", was created during a period in which the Democrats had supermajorities in the Senate and crushing majorities in the House. This is what we get when America votes Democrat in massive numbers.

The Commission has a large majority of people who believe that we must privatize Social Security and make punishing cuts to Medicare. Who put them there? Are they all Republicans? Nope. They're representatives of both parties and Obama put them there.

To be sure, there has been some push-back from within the Democrat party to the sharp conservative tilt of the Commission. But anyone who knows anything about the House Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Party knows that they are clowns. At times they seem full of sound and fury, but ultimately they do nothing but cave in to the corporate-friendly Democrat leadership. They are a marginal force in the organization of which they are a basically passive appendage.

My point in saying all of this isn't to hammer away at the Democrats because I have something personal against them. The point is that we, i.e. ordinary people who have the "crazy" view that Medicare and Social Security shouldn't be slahsed and burned, have to know who the enemy is. It is not just the Republican Party. It is both the Republicans and the Democrats, although I must admit that right now the Democrats are certainly giving the GOP a run for their money. If pushed I would say that the Democrats are a bigger part of the problem than the Republicans. At least most people know the Republicans suck. The trouble with the Democrats is that they try to sweet talk you. They mislead plenty of good people who care about admirable things (e.g. stopping climate change, beating back the advance of the Right, stopping wars and occupation, etc. etc.) and siphon off legitimate oppositional political energy and defuse it. They manipulate legitimate anger about the system and use it to do essentially the same things that the Republicans do. That's perverse. We deserve better.