Pelosi: George Washington Warned Us About Schemers Like Paul Ryan

Photo Credit: jurvetson

You know, men who would dare to balance the federal budget within 10-28 years, who would ravage federal programs with modest slow-downs in their increased spending, who would bend cost curves to the breaking point…like, four degrees or so. Joel Gehrke reports:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., expressed misgivings about the efficacy of President Obama’s so-called “charm offensive,” saying that House Republicans seem “at war with [their] own government.”

“By and large, the approach the Republicans take is that they are there to shrink the role of government to the point where it really recalls to mind a statement of President Washington who cautioned about a political party at war with its own government,” Pelosi told reporters today in response to a question about the charm offensive.

Now that you’ve heard about the radicalism of Republicans, check out the modest goals of Democrats:

As for Democrats, Pelosi said that “we don’t want any more government than we need, but we respect the public role: public private partnerships, and putting a referee on the field . . . to monitor clean air, clean water, food safety; a cop on the beat for the protection of our neighborhoods.”

Here’s the real radicalism. If you ever need to know how committed Washington Democrats are to maintaining the current levels of spending their attendant increases, please refer to this quote. Just as with sequester, everything useful the federal government does manages to fall in the gap between the Democrats’ outrageously irresponsible budget (or, in years past, Obama speeches about budgets) and Ryan’s attempts at sanity. It is Nancy Pelosi’s belief, explicitly, that anything less than what exists at this very moment would be less “government than we need,” would disrespect the “public role,” and take the referee off the field and cops off the beat.

Read more from this story HERE.