Randi Rhodes: Got 'Em Cornered

President Obama has vowed to veto any attempt by Congress to avoid the automatic budget cuts that were mandated as the price of Super Committee failure. The President was essentially asking Congress “What part of ‘automatic’ don’t you understand?” The automatic budget cuts were set up to be the price that would have to be paid for failure to reach agreement. Now Republicans don’t want to pay the price for what they did. But then that’s how we got into this budget mess in the first place.

When they let the Super Committee fail, Republicans assumed they could renege on the deal. Now President Obama is telling them that they have to face the consequences of their action... or lack of action, as the case may be. The thing that killed any chance of a deal was Republican refusal to budge on taxes, not Democratic insistence on protecting entitlement programs. The problem wasn’t Democratic sacred cows, it was Republican bull. You should blame Grover Norquist. How can you know? Because the Wall Street Journal says you should thank Grover Norquist.

Herman Cain says he was relieved when he learned that a surgeon who was going to operate on him was a Christian. I look for a lot of things in a surgeon, but over-reliance on faith is not one of them. Cain said he was worried when he was told his surgeon’s name was Dr. Abdallah. Wow. Herman, you have some things wrong with you that no doctor can fix.

Finally, a new study shows that people who watch Fox News actually know less about what is going on than people who don’t watch any news at all. In other words, you’re better informed not knowing anything than you are knowing the stuff you get from Fox News. You’re better off being uninformed than you are being misinformed—uninformed people can find out the truth, but if you tell the truth to misinformed people, they’ll argue against it. A researcher said “there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.” That “something” has a name—and it’s Bill O’Reilly. And Brian Kilmeade. And Sean Hannity. And whatever the names of those blonde women are.

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48 years ago today...

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