Blaring headlines announce it: Lindsey Graham breaks with Grover Norquist!!! You'd think he'd finally recognized the need to raise some taxes to address deficits. You know, to avoid cutting into the bones of democracy. But in this day and age, even willingness meekly to address a couple of loopholes here and there counts as parading around bare-chested, sword raised, bravery busting out like Dolly Parton at bedtime.
What he said was more along these lines:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) broke with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist on Tuesday, telling ABC's Jonathan Karl that he supported eliminating tax deductions in order to help get the country back on solid fiscal footing.
"We are so far in debt that if you don't give up some ideological ground, the country sinks," Graham said.
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He praised Norquist for "doing a great service" but said that due to the country's poor fiscal climate, the Republican party's position must evolve.
"When you talk about eliminating deductions and tax credits for the few, at the expense of the many, I think over time the Republican party's position is going to shift. It needs to, quite frankly, because we are $16 trillion in debt," he said.
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"I'm willing to move my party, or try to, on the tax issue. I need someone on the Democratic side being willing to move their party on structural changes to entitlements."
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Asked whether Romney agreed with him, Graham said he wasn't sure. "Someone needs to ask him," he quipped.
Coupla things: first, he's boldly talking about closing a few loopholes. BFD.
Admittedly, though, making such a statement has come to constitute something resembling sanity among Rs nowadays, even if it's as brave as a kid dipping his toe into the ocean and running away from a one-inch wave. Had to get in his strokes for Norquist, though. But props to him for suggesting that Rs need to give some ground. That it's neither considered obvious nor goes without saying as it always had until Newt Gingrich arrived on the scene, followed in close order by Mr Norquist, is more revealing about the current Rs than anything else he said.
Second, he suggests Ds have been unwilling to address structural reform of entitlements. That's a Rominee-size whopper, appropriately biblical in proportions. I guess he forgot the "grand bargain," away from which John Boehner retreated like Rominee from everything he ever said or did in Massachusetts. That statement takes what balls Graham might have slightly grown and shrinks them into wizened little peas.
Lastly: someone ought to ask Romney. Yeah, right. Good luck with that.
Mitt Romney: spineless liar; not to mention not knowing WTF he's talking about. (Read the linked article: the guy was a governor, ferchrissakes! and he doesn't know about federal money to states???) How, on planet earth, in the Milky Way, in the known universe, can this man be the Rominee of a major and formerly credible political party? Even a party in which Lindsey Graham's statement constitutes awesome statesmanship.
