I know that the WSJ is right-wing and probably got even more so since it got bought by Murdoch, but this opening paragraph to an article made me gag:

House Minority Leader John Boehner recently attacked the potential “wasteful spending” and “mountains of debt” in President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan. A few days later, he warmly invited Mr. Obama to address House Republicans, saying, “We do not want partisan differences to stall achievement.”

In light of what has happened over the past eight years, do I even need to explain why this made me gag?

The filibuster mentality, interestingly, is noted quickly in the article:

Republicans can’t simply be “the party of ‘no,’ ” Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, said in an interview this month, but must offer solutions to voters’ problems. “We have to give the American people reasons to take a look at us,” he said.

However, the gag-inducing opening paragraph made clear that the usual GOP Reality Distortion Field is at full strength–as if they have not been the ones responsible for the exploding budget deficit, or that they have not been ultra-partisan for the past decade and more.

We’ve heard this conciliatory tone from them before, and it has come to nothing before; I don’t trust them to be any more non-partisan than is in their own self-interest, and usually they find that it is not at all in their interest.

I have the feeling that Republicans will simply do what they do best: lie and smear. Likely, they will simply run against themselves–as it was put in an article someone showed me a few months ago, they will run out the back door, come around to the front, and start shouting in protest against the house they built. They will now blame all of the mess that Republicans created over the past eight years on the majority; they will loudly protest against every necessary and painful hard choice that must be made to correct things. They will put forth as their “ideas” unworkable, pandering, pipe-dream “solutions” which they know will never be tested but which will sound nice to voters, from whom Obama will ask for sacrifice instead. When Obama asks for work, Republicans will say that Americans deserve to rest; when Obama asks the wealthy to pay their fair share, they will scream bloody murder about “taxing Americans to death”; when Obama tries to introduce reasonable regulations on businesses so as to avoid more of the kind of economic disasters we now face, Republicans will say he’s anti-business and is destroying the economy, and that we should trust the marketplace.

We’ve seen the “ideas” that the GOP is enamored of, and we now suffer the damage those ideas bring. Hopefully, the American people will be able to see beyond the attractive fluff they will throw up. But do not believe for a second that the lies and obstructionism are a thing of the past. At best, we’re going to see a new set of sheep’s clothing for the wolves, but it’s still the same old pack of wolves. While the pack has been decimated, they still have teeth, and they are still wolves. That, so far, has not been subject to change.