Actually, if you take this metaphor seriously (which you shouldn’t), the GOP’s also in the role of the “rapist,” no?

Remember, this guy is Obama’s lead negotiator with Republicans on the budget.

In setting up his comparison, the vice president explained to the audience that before the Violence Against Women Act that he championed was passed into law, “there was this attitude in our society of blaming the victim,” according to a press pool account of the event.



“When a woman got raped, blame her because she was wearing a skirt too short, she looked the wrong way or she wasn’t home in time to make the dinner,” Biden said.

“We’ve gotten by that,” he said. “But it’s amazing how these Republicans, the right wing of this party – whose philosophy threw us into this God-awful hole we’re in, gave us the tremendous deficit we’ve inherited – that they’re now using, now attempting to use, the very economic condition they have created to blame the victim – whether it’s organized labor or ordinary middle-class working men and women. It’s bizarre. It’s bizarre.”



And so, two years and two months into The One’s presidency, with the new Republican House desperate to get him to slash spending and reform entitlements, somehow even the unfathomably huge deficits he’s running are an intractable problem he’s inherited from the GOP. For a gloss on that, see the new numbers from CBO today estimating that Obama’s budget proposal for the next decade would increase the deficit by $9.5 trillion, a full $2 trillion higher than the White House previously claimed. He isn’t remotely serious about solvency — if he were, his budget would necessarily look more like this — and he also isn’t willing to take political risks even when they’re ideologically germane. Reforming entitlements is both electorally toxic and essentially conservative; raising taxes would, at least, please his base while raising some extra revenue, but of course that’s electorally toxic too. So, no dice. The money line from WaPo’s write-up of CBO’s new numbers: “Much of the negative impact on the nation’s budget outlook would come from the president’s proposals to maintain tax cuts for the middle class that are now due to expire in 2012.” If he and Biden are serious about erasing those tremendous deficits, why not “disinherit” those Republican cuts?

Exit question: Are public employee unions the “victims” in their battle with Scott Walker and Republicans? I thought the victim was someone else.