Rep. McMorris Rodgers can't name actual spending cuts

via Think Progress In the era of debt ceiling standoffs and self-imposed fiscal ultra-chasms, this is how you become a Very Important Person in Republican circles: You demand immediate, painful spending cuts, and then you look positively baffled when someone actually suggests you name what cuts you're actually proposing.

McMORRIS RODGERS: We need to have the spending cuts.

BLITZER: What? Give me an example?

McMORRIS RODGERS: Well, it is, it's, looking at the spending, looking at entitlement reform, looking at the growth in government. And you know what the President put on the table, the President is moving in the wrong direction. He proposed higher taxes than he ever said during the campaign, more stimulus, more spending, that's moving us in the wrong direction.

I think you might actually be able to hear the little click that marks the beginning of the pre-recorded talking point.

I hope the press and/or punditry is actually beginning to catch on here. The Republicans aren't going to name spending cuts. They're not going to name the supposed loopholes they want to close, or the supposed deductions they want to take away, or any of the rest of it. Yes, they want to do unspecified things involving Medicare and the like, but they continue to insist that the Democrats be the ones to actually propose screwing with those things, so that the Republicans can run in the next election on how they really didn't want to do that stuff (while simultaneously demanding it be done, because sweet Jesus, our political discourse really is that dumb).

This entire fiscal cliff business could be avoided by simply ignoring the Republicans outright. Pretend they're not there. They're the ones most insistent that the sequester will doom (defense!) things, they're the ones foaming at the mouth about how all these efforts America took at their insistence to cut the stupid debt right now because Austeritah are, as it turns out, going to kill us all in our sleep. But after all that hostage taking and supercommittees and very serious three-page pamphlets with big pictures and zero math and now the fiscal cliiiiiiff, the only solutions they're proposing are (1) to cut taxes on rich people yet-a-freaking-gain, and (2) to pay for that by effing up other people's Medicare. That's a worse plan than doing nothing. It's so stupid and self-serving a plan that Very Important Republicans on the teevee go to great lengths to avoid even having to say it out loud.

So fine, let's have the Senate pass all the necessary bills for maintaining unemployment insurance, the "doc fix," canceling the stupid sequester, extending some, but not all, of the We Love Deficits Forevah Tax Cuts, and then the Republicans can decide which of those things they want to refuse. This is a stupid game, it's been a stupid game since long before the "debt ceiling" fiasco last year, it was a stupid game back when George W. Bush was traveling around the country demanding we shove everyone's Social Security retirement funds into the pre-great-recession stock market because hey, just imagine how rich and well-off you suckers will be if Wall Street is managing all your retirement money for you. No, please. Let's just stop this nonsense.

If Republicans want to be the party of screwing people out of their promised benefits, or of making people work at their damn minimum wage jobs until they're 90 billion years old, or the party of not feeding children, or the party of not giving a damn about anyone who doesn't have at least three homes and 12 cars, let them. But let them own that, and argue for it themselves, and spell out exactly what it is they want in policy and legislation without all this sniffling about how the Democrats need to propose all of that for them. If they want to screw people, they should at least have the ideological courage to say who they want to screw.