Jon Stewart mocks the sequester hysteria.
Yes, he targets Republicans towards the end. But it’s still pretty funny.(h/t my wife)
I’m not a Jon Stewart fan, but he wouldn’t be popular if he wasn’t tuned in. Does his cavalier approach to the sequester reflect a popular skepticism to the sequester hysteria?
Scott Rasmussen writes in Sequester puts Elected Washington on Trial:
The expectation was that voters would rise up and protest the automatic spending cuts with such vehemence that it would force Republicans and Democrats to work together. But it hasn’t happened. In fact, just 36 percent of voters want Congress and the president to stop the automatic cuts.As a result, the White House and many media organizations have been trying to raise the alarm. President Obama himself used his State of the Union address to say, “These sudden, harsh, arbitrary cuts would jeopardize our military readiness.” To make sure voters understood his concern, he added, “They’d devastate priorities like education, energy and medical research. They would certainly slow our recovery and cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs.”…Still, the voters haven’t come around. The president proposed replacing the across-the-board spending cuts with a combination of tax hikes and specific spending cuts. Only 39 percent favor that proposal. Forty-two percent oppose it and prefer the automatic spending cuts, instead.
Charles Krauthammer exposes the cynicism behind those hyping the hysteria:
Think of the cynicism of that. The worst case scenario is that the government makes a small, minuscule cut in spending on the way to beginning of a journey of recovery in to fiscal health, and that it doesn’t hurt us, we actually come out of it alive. And, that to them, is the worst case. It means, think of how they are weighing the national interest, which needs a cut in spending and these parochial special interests.
Jon Stewart might be on to something. Maybe the public has become inured to the Firehouse Syndrome.
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