Catch of the Day

Yeah, everyone is linking to this, but it's too good to pass up. Luke Johnson read John Boehner's quote from Lincoln today, and noted:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) quotes Abraham Lincoln in a memo released Thursday as warning of debt, but ignores the former president's call for a tax or tariff.

Of course, the reason that Boehner did that -- I mean, apart from the appalling sloppiness and laziness that a generation of easy accommodation by Fox News and the rest of the GOP-aligned partisan press has taught to Republican politicians -- is that Boehner, and most of the House Republicans don't actually care about federal budget deficits. This is our old friend, the War on Budgeting: Republicans have plenty of spending they don't like, but they are at best indifferent to the difference between federal revenues and expenditures, and most of the time they just don't acknowledge that revenues, expenditures, and the deficit have any relationship whatsoever.

Oh, speaking of lazy: Greg Sargeant is good on the incoherence of the Boehner memo when it comes to sequestration, which continues to be both a great GOP achievement and all Obama's fault. As for me, I just can't get over how pathetic it is for a party to brag about "forcing" the other party to pass a pretty much meaningless budget resolution.

The bottom line here is that there really are strong disincentives for, well, trying hard. That is, if your job is to spin, and you are guaranteed a solid hit across the GOP-aligned press no matter what junk you send out (and, along with that, you know that your core audience won't ever see the criticisms of your spin, even if they were open to believing them).

At any rate: Nice catch!