Checking In With Bob Woodward of Watergate Fame...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny

Bob Woodward, the very same investigative reporter that along with Carl Bernstein was ultimately responsible for bringing down President Richard M. Nixon in the early seventies is reporting the White House is responsible for the looming sequestration. Hm, anybody else hear the scrambling of liberals ardently and strenuously denying Woodward's allegations?

What Woodward is reporting is very plausible, in fact it is more likely than not in the world of dirty political gamesmanship. And for those who believe the democrat party is above dirty politics one only needs to harken back to the days of LBJ and Mayor Daley to realize the democrats are primo at dirty politics in the furtherance of their agenda.

The Washington Post - Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government. {Read More}

Spin as they may the reality is Obama and his administration in a stroke of almost genius proportions figured out a way to almost pin sequestration on the opposition party. A master plan they hoped Americans would fall far. As I said, DIRTY politics is nothing new to the democrat party. dEmocrats and rEpublicans are essentially cut from the same soiled cloth.

Via: Memeorandum