BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Republicans went all crazy yesterday and countered the White House with a fiscal cliff proposal that was first dreamed up by that crazy right-winger Erskine Bowles.

Bowles, who used to toil in the trenches as Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff and who once ran for office in North Carolina as a Democrat, has obviously been seduced by that other right-wing kook, Alan Simpson. How dare Bowles, the closing days of the Super Committee, offer something so radical as to include $800 billion in revenues and about double that in spending cuts.

The White House quickly rejected this offer, because they obviously won the election, and one thing this election taught us was that the American people really want more stimulus money from Washington.

For those who haven’t been following, the White House first offer, despite its serious nature, provoked guffaws within the Republican ranks, because, well, it was pretty funny.

Let’s raise taxes on rich people and then take that money and give it to Big City Mayors so they can pay off their labor unions. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Not.

We are going over the cliff. Let’s just prepare for that eventuality.

And if we don’t, we should.

It would be sad if the Congress decided to punt until next year, with a small measure that would postpone the tax increases and the spending cuts.

By the way, tax increases can always be reversed, and the automatic spending cuts don’t really start to bite for six months or so. There is plenty of time to actually work out a deal that would be fiscally responsible.

The Bowles plan wouldn’t be that earth-shattering. It would introduce a small measure of fiscal responsibility in a town that calls a forced mechanism to be fiscally responsible a crisis.

People worry that we are turning into Greece, and maybe we are. But in Europe, they have protests in the streets when legislators try to pass increased taxes and decreased spending.

In America, we have the media going absolutely ape-shit over the fact that if Congress does nothing (and I mean nothing), we have an opportunity to take a small step to increase taxes and decrease spending.

So far, I haven’t seen any other protests in the USA about the so-called fiscal cliff.

If the economy does crash after we go over the cliff (put me down as a skeptic), the American people will blame Obama.

He hasn’t been serious in these negotiations (his first offer was a complete joke), and since he is the guy running the country, he gets the blame.

Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.