House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) on Medicare: "promises have been made that frankly are not going to be kept."
Oh for the love of God, he just lobbed that one right in the wheelhouse. That should be on every single ad Democrats run from now until 2012.
Watching the WSJ Opinion Journal video interview from which that quote was taken really made me feel a touch of loathing for Cantor that I've never had before.
ReplyDeleteFirst, he opened by claiming that what distinguished him from Democrats is that Democrats wanted to raise taxes on the middle and working classes. Then he talked about how Obama had never run a business or created a job. Conceded: it is more difficult to end up "running a business" when your daddy didn't create one for you as well as smoothing your political career starting in college. This made his next statements, about how Republicans just want to promote equality of opportunity, extra grating.
Cantor is clearly sane and intelligent, as opposed to certain other prominent members of his party, so it's especially frustrating to hear him parrot Tea Party nonsense about fundamental tax reform that somehow would avoid having anyone's taxes go up. (Um, if you simplify the tax code like in Reagan's '86 reform, some people's taxes will go up. You can't clear the underbrush of differential rates based on source of income, deduction, credits, etc. without some people's taxes increasing.)
That said, I watched up to the 15:30 point when Cantor makes the remarks that made the headlines, and I'm pretty sure his point is not that Republicans made promises that Republicans aren't going to keep, but rather that the Medicare program in its current form is unsustainable and that it was always absurd to think we could indefinitely fund all healthcare for the elderly. (It would be absurd, which is why we needed "death panels," aka an IPAB that can actually force Congress to make difficult decisions about what -- not whose, as Palin delusionally claimed -- treatments and medications Medicare ought to cover.)