Strassel: Two Cliff-Top Lessons for GOP

The GOP should learn 2 big lessons from the recent round of failed debt talks, writes Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal. First, Mr. Obama is not, and will never be a serious negotiating partner.

House Speaker John Boehner came out of the election assuming his counterpart—faced with a dramatic economic moment—would act the statesman. With working-class taxpayers on the line, the military on the chopping block and the economy in the balance, Mr. Boehner found it impossible to believe the president would fail to see the risks at hand.

Then again, this was the same president who in 2011, during the debt-ceiling negotiations, proved willing to risk national default if it meant he could keep spending...
In that context, it seems no surprise that Mr. Boehner's worthy offer, in November, to offer Mr. Obama the tax revenue he sought—by closing deductions on higher earners—was treated with derision. Mr. Obama's only response was to pocket that offer and demand more.

The GOP's hope that this White House would walk the plank with it on entitlement reform was equally fanciful. Mr. Obama won't willingly agree to any serious cuts, to any meaningful entitlement reform, ever. He will risk everything—the "middle class" he claims to want to protect, his economic legacy—to continue growing government.

The second lesson is that a house divided is a losing house.

Be of Good Cheer, Conservatives

2012 had more than its share of disappointments for conservatives. The twisted logic of the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision—a law forcing people to purchase health insurance isn't constitutional, so we'll make the it constitutional by calling it a tax—was unfathomable. The growth of food stamps and federal welfare payments (to $1.03 trillion annually) was staggering. The U.S.'s precipitous drop out of the top 10 in the world's Prosperity Index was disheartening. The reelection of a liberal-progressive president—whose policies had utterly failed the nation by every economic measure—was shocking.

The country has weathered dark liberal-progressive storms in the past, and it will again. As Amity Shlaes makes clear in her book, The Forgotten Man, Franklin D. Roosevelt (the current president's hero) prolonged the Great Depression in the U.S. long after other industrialized nations were back on their feet. He, too, waged class warfare, persecuted and vindictively taxed business people, regulated the private sector into paralysis, and showered political favors on groups and business cronies that cozied up to him. Many of FDR's failed economic policies left with him, however; and America's economy rebounded, enjoying more than a half-century of innovation, growth and prosperity. The FDR experience serves as a reminder that the present circumstances may be disheartening, but the future still holds promise.

One example of that promise is domestic energy. Today while the White House pursues the fool's gold of green energy policies, trillions of dollars of black gold sit waiting beneath America's feet and just off her shores. Try hard as he may, this president can neither un-invent the technology that is making America's black gold rush possible nor un-discover the vast fields of natural resources available to the nation. He can only succeed in delaying their full potential. (Read more about the amazing energy boom.)

So be of good cheer. America's natural and human resources are her strength, and they still offer a bright future. 

The Liberal-Progressive Religion

Logic, consistency and civility aren't strengths of Liberal-Progressive ideology because it's a fundamentalist religion with its own canon, writes Robert Hall in a piece that would be funny if his observations weren't so true. Here are a few:

• If conservatives oppose gay marriage, it is an atrocity; but if Muslims call for the murder of gays, it's a heartwarming display of Multiculturalism.
• The Rich are evil, but only if they earned their money in business and are not Progressives. So mega-millionaires Michael Moore, Warren Buffet, Al Gore, George Soros, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Tax Cheat Tim Geithner, Angelo "Friends of Angelo at Countrywide" Mozilo and any number of entertainment and athletic stars are all righteous people, while a couple each working 60 hours a week to bring home $260k are among the evil rich who aren't "paying their fair share."
• It isn't racist to require minorities to identify themselves to cash a check, fly, drive, buy a gun, buy alcohol, buy tobacco, sign up for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Welfare, or to enter a government building, Obama rally, or the Democrat National convention, but it is racism to ask for ID to vote.
• Progressives think it's an outrage if you don't want to pay for free birth control for yuppie law students, but completely ignore the stoning of women, child marriages, female genital mutilation, honor killings of female relatives for even speaking to a strange man and oppressive inequality of women in Muslim countries under Shari'a Law.
• Children are a high priority. As long as they are children of the Progressive Elect voting blocks in the US. So banning DDT to save the birds to feel good about the Environment was wonderful, and several million dead black, brown, and yellow kids from malaria in the Third World mattered not at all. Nor did the birds, of course, when it was time to build eagle-chopper wind farms in homage to Big Green.

Worth the whole read for anyone who must deal with the cognitive dissonant positions of the Progressive self-righteous, self-annointed 'elect'.