Obama Starts Negotiating .... With Nobody in Particular

As the sequester date of March first gets closer, president Obama has begun "negotiating" the deal to avoid that from happening.  These faux negotiations are happening in the media, but not in reality.  There are no meetings with Republican congressional leaders.  There are no telephone calls followed by leaks regarding who said what. Indeed, none of the normal "secret" negotiations are underway.  So Obama is doing what comes naturally to him:  lying, and using the media as his helpful pawns.  Yesterday,  the Huffington Post published a piece called "Medicare Eligibility Age Off the Table in Sequestration Talks, White House Says".  The report excitedly tells us that Obama has removed raising the 65 year age for Medicare coverage from the items being offered to avoid sequestration.  On the other hand, the article reports that Obama has reconfirmed that he would switch the Social Security cost of living index to the chained CPI, a move which would reduce future Social Security payments to beneficiaries. 

So what is wrong with that report?  Where to start, where to start?  Let's start with the biggest item first.  There are no sequestration talks.  Actually, that needs to be said more emphatically.

THERE ARE NO SEQUESTRATION TALKS!!!!!

Obviously, if there are no talks, then there is nothing on the table being offered.  In other words, the entire discussion of taking Medicare off the table but putting Social Security cuts on the table is just a lie.  What actually has happened is that Obama is offering trial balloons in the hope of luring the GOP into more secret talks, a result which the GOP will hopefully resist.  Indeed, the very lures that Obama is using shows why Republicans should insist that any proposal from Obama be made in public.  Just think; Obama has supposedly removed the Medicare eligibility age from consideration.  Does anyone remember 2011?  During the summer of 2011, John Boehner reported that Obama had suggested his agreement to a higher age for Medicare as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling.  The White House responded with a fury that Obama had said no such thing and that he would never consider raising the Medicare age.  Indeed, the current announcement by Jay Carney that the Medicare age was now off the table indicates that it previously was on the table.  Boehner was telling the truth in 2011 and Obama was lying.  No surprise there!  Of course, since everything said in 2011 was in "secret" talks, the media can just ignore this whole mess.

At some point it will surely dawn on Obama that even with the help of the media, he cannot negotiate a deal without someone on the other side of the table.  In the meantime, we can watch Obama and the Obamacrats thrash about like some fish out of water.