I Actually Agree With A Small Part Of This

     From Lawrence Hunter writing at Forbes:

 ...[T]he larger problem for Republicans is that they are preparing to play Charlie Brown to Barack Obama’s Lucy on Social Security, again.  The congressional Republican leadership is all charged up to cut Social Security in a Grand Bargain with President Obama ... They better beware though; Lucy is just about to jerk the football out from under them, again, and they are going to fall flat on their keisters, again, if they don’t wise up. ...

Mr. Obama has been tempting Republicans with a Grand Bargain on the deficit in which Republicans would concede tax increases on people earning more than $250,000 a year in exchange for the president’s delivering congressional Democrats on Social Security cuts through so-called “reforms” that would cut inflation adjustments (COLAs), means test (cut) the program on the benefits side and transform the flat-rate payroll-tax pension contribution into a progressive income tax by raising or eliminating the annual cap on the amount of earnings on which the payroll tax must be paid. ...

From Mr. Obama’s perspective it represents a great deal. With ObamaCare, the president already has demonstrated his callousness toward old people and a ruthless willingness to sacrifice senior citizens to achieve his political ends.  A substantial majority of old people didn’t vote for him, and now he won’t be running again, anyway.  The so-called Social Security “reforms” being dangled before Republicans are a redistributionist’s dream come true, which is just another demonstration—as if one is required—of why the Republican Party is the stupid party.  But now it’s worse; it makes the GOP the evil party as well. ...

Republicans have become so fixated on their mistaken notion that Social Security is largely responsible for the deficit, and they are so intent on cutting cost of living allowances for current retirees that they are willing to help the president transform Social Security into the world’s biggest welfare program, a major step toward the Democrats’ goal of putting everyone in America on welfare.

Republicans insist on treating Social Security like welfare, and now they want to turn it into welfare in fact. ... The Republican Party wants to stigmatize retirees by treating them like welfare queens ... Worse than the stupid party; worse even than the evil party; the Republican Party has become the brain-dead, zombie party.