Pat Buchanan Nails It

In an article entitled Obama Blows Up the Bridge, Pat Buchanan nails the many reasons for deep seated antipathy to the President's speech on the budget.

"Rather than building bridges, he's poisoning wells," said Rep. Paul Ryan, after listening to Barack Obama's scathing attack on his deficit-reduction plan as a shredding of America's social contract with the elderly and poor.

Ryan is right. Yet, with Obama's partisan savagery, virtually calling the GOP plan immoral, we have clarity.

There will be no grand bipartisan bargain on taxes and spending.

The two parties on Capitol Hill and the president will not be coming together to solve the gravest financial and fiscal crisis America has faced since the Great Depression. Between them today is a high wall and a deep ditch.

The heart of the Ryan plan is to turn Medicaid into block grants to the states, so each can decide for itself how best to use the funds, and to convert Medicare into a program where the U.S. government would provide citizens with the funds and freedom to chose whatever health insurance they wished to buy.

Obama denounced both.

There you have it, the President shows not a shred of Clinton's triangulation. Say what you will about the forty-second President, his triangulation produced welfare reform, an historic free trade agreement and balanced budgets. Obama has yet to get significant Republican support for a single initiative. He lacks serious purpose and is unable to recognize that his positions took a beating in November. Further success will elude him.