Take your corners, gentlemen! The National Debt Ceiling Smack Talking Series is about to begin!

Biden and McCarthy clash ahead of White House debt ceiling meeting

As President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy prepare to meet Wednesday afternoon to discuss the looming U.S. debt ceiling deadline, both sides are waging an increasingly bitter messaging battle, one that offers a glimpse of how the next few months of political knife fighting could unfold.

…“If [Biden] doesn’t want to play politics, and if he wants to start negotiating, let’s sit down and start negotiating where we could come together for the American public,” said McCarthy.

That sounds entirely too reasonable for the Biden White House. They prefer to have the press describe it as if they were under siege by MEGA-MAGA-BARBARIANS™ and are the only thing standing between the unwashed hordes in red caps and the existential threat to democracy as we know it.

…A White House memo circulated Tuesday sought to portray the 3:15 p.m. ET meeting as a showdown, one between a Democratic president who will protect Social Security, Medicare, health insurance and food stamps, and a House Republican majority that will demand cuts to these programs in exchange for helping Democrats avoid a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt.

It’s the usual gas-lighting bluster coming from the Biden camp, as Republicans have been very clear about NOT touching a hair on the head of any of those things. But Dems so love to scare little old ladies half to death to keep them in the Big Blue Tent.

There are no considerations AT ALL for reforms to Social Security & Medicare when it comes to the debt ceiling.

Dems & the WH are trying to make it about Social Security to scare people.

We are talking about reforms to spending through non-defense discretionary dollars! pic.twitter.com/TBV1HFFcDk

— Congressman Byron Donalds (@RepDonaldsPress) January 26, 2023

Hard to tell where the unbiased media sits on all this…I kid, I kid. They’re busy setting the narrative already, as they do love to indulge this White House’s fantasy scenarios.

…Could the economy fall prey to McCarthy’s ambition?
The potential fallout from the Biden-McCarthy standoff has raised expectations for their meeting to extraordinary heights.

Their encounter is vital to McCarthy because it is imperative for him to be seen as standing up to Biden to stay in the good graces of the extreme GOP majority. In farcical scenes in which he took 15 ballots to win the speakership last month, the California Republican effectively pledged to extract spending cut concessions from Biden. So it’s fair to wonder whether McCarthy is risking the economic wellbeing of tens of millions of Americans to fulfill his own ambitions.

Trust me – you’ll find no pieces pondering if the economy is falling prey to a doddering geriatric president’s dementia.

Here’s another example popping up today. Witness this “How DARE Republicans hold debt ceiling HOSTAGE” side of the screed…

The debt-ceiling hostage threat is not a way to bring the parties to the table. It’s what Republicans do because they won’t negotiate. @jonathanchait writes https://t.co/sUk9IRcETn

— Intelligencer (@intelligencer) February 1, 2023

…proving yet again that liberals, Lefties and Democrats have the retention spans of gnats.

AKA “It’s only cool when WE do it.”

REMINDER: In 2017, Schumer bragged about Democrats using the debt limit as leverage in future spending negotiations.

SCHUMER: “What’s our leverage?… We only had one thing as leverage at that point, which was the debt ceiling.” https://t.co/2owiRZl8a5

— Senate Republican Communications Center (@SRCC) February 1, 2023

As much as I hate correcting a U.S. senator…

Joe Biden refuses to negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

He believes that the press will protect him – this is completely unreasonable. pic.twitter.com/ai1GgUNlwu

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) January 28, 2023

…dude, the press is already on it. MSM is doing everything it can to get Grampa Joe and his gang of incompetents off the hook while making sure the villainous Snidely Whiplash mustache is taped squarely on McCarthy’s upper lip. Right up to never negotiate with HOSTAGE TAKERS.

…McCarthy went on to tell reporters yesterday that it’s “irresponsible to say, as the leader of the free world, to say he’s not going to negotiate.” But that’s backwards: Since when is it responsible for the leader of the free world to negotiate with those threatening Americans with deliberate harm? Why would an American president voluntarily try to negotiate in good faith with those effectively pointing a gun at his country’s economy?

…McCarthy and his party, in other words, have launched a hostage crisis without taking the time to fill out a ransom note. As we discussed last week, the speaker, who realizes that putting his party’s unpopular demands on paper risks a political backlash, expects to sit down with the Biden and effectively say, “Tell me what you’ll give us to prevent a catastrophe, and I’ll let you know when I’m satisfied.”

What’s scarier than a GOP debt ceiling crisis? A GOP debt ceiling crisis launched by officials who have no idea what they’re doing.

Did you find that last line as unintentionally hilarious as I did? Oh, I hope so.

The fact is, there are lots of things – even little things – that can be carved away for a start at some kind of fiscal sanity. It all eventually adds up. When we’re this deep in, do NPR, PBS, NEA, and heated sidewalks to nowhere need funding? They’d all be easy, relatively pain-free, good places to start. Somebody’s pet projects/sacred cows of course, but they’re something. People’s lives don’t revolve around an Evening at the Kennedy Center broadcast. Whack it.

By the way, the guy in the White House now who refuses to negotiate with debt ceiling terrorists didn’t always feel that way. Kind of like Chuck Schumer using the ceiling for leverage in 2017, Joe Biden has had his moment of debt defiance, too.

…On March 16, 2006, then-Senator Biden took to the well of the Senate to deliver an impassioned speech arguing against raising the debt limit, and his words are unrecognizable from the rhetoric of President Biden today.

Attacking “the disastrous policies of this [George W. Bush’s] administration,” Biden explained that “because this massive accumulation of debt was predicted, because it was foreseeable, because it was unnecessary, because it was the result of willful and reckless disregard for the warnings that were given and for the fundamentals of economic management, I am voting against the debt limit increase.”

Biden continued, lamenting that the country’s “national debt will be $8.6 trillion at the end of this year” and worrying President Bush’s budget “will bring that number to $11.8 trillion at the end of the next 5 years.”

$11T almost seems quaint, doesn’t it?

Was Biden a man of principle then? So hard to keep track of this grifter’s moves.

He’s obviously forgotten most of them himself.

The lines are chalked and play commences shortly.

Keep an ear out for the whistle.