Boehner's whining is finding an audience

John Boehner, with an assist from Bob Woodward, is doing a nice job spinning the interpersonal side of his failed negotiations with Obama. While it's natural for right-wing media to take up his narrative, his spin is trickling into the mainstream, too.

On the right, the new image of Obama the Negotiator is oddly flattering, at least to the ears of a liberal accustomed to fretting about the president's accommodating style.. The personalized corollary of the right's current view of Obama as a legislative juggernaut is Obama as an imperious, arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway stonewaller. Here's Peggy Noonan:

He didn't deepen any relationships or begin any potential alliances with Republicans, who still, actually, hold the House. The old animosity was aggravated. Some Republicans were mildly hopeful a second term might moderate those presidential attitudes that didn't quite work the first time, such as holding himself aloof from the position and predicaments of those who oppose him, while betraying an air of disdain for their arguments. He is not quick to assume good faith. Some thought his election victory might liberate him, make his approach more expansive. That didn't happen.

Who's more scared of the sequester?

Since the limited fiscal cliff deal was struck, there's naturally been a ton of speculation whether the Republicans will indulge in a fresh round of debt ceiling terrorism when the treasury reaches the end of its rope in a couple of months, and whether Obama will blink if they do.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, John Boehner indicated that the debt ceiling may play more of a support role, and that the sequestered spending cuts postponed for just two months by the Jan. 1 agreement are the GOP's main source of leverage. Here's how he sketched out his alleged negotiating strategy, as recounted by the WSJ's Stephen Moore:

The real showdown will be on the debt ceiling and the spending sequester in March. I ask Mr. Boehner if he will take the debt-ceiling talks to the brink—risking a government shutdown and debt downgrade from the credit agencies—given that it didn't work in 2011 and President Obama has said he won't bargain on the matter.

The debt bill is "one point of leverage," Mr. Boehner says, but he also hedges, noting that it is "not the ultimate leverage." He says that Republicans won't back down from the so-called Boehner rule: that every dollar of raising the debt ceiling will require one dollar of spending cuts over the next 10 years. Rather than forcing a deal, the insistence may result in a series of monthly debt-ceiling increases.

The Republicans' stronger card, Mr. Boehner believes, will be the automatic spending sequester trigger that trims all discretionary programs—defense and domestic. It now appears that the president made a severe political miscalculation when he came up with the sequester idea in 2011.

Where taxes are always too high

Another day, another deeply misleading screed on taxes by a Wall Street Journal editorialist - in this case, Stephen Moore. Democrats, he warns, are proposing tax increases that will bring us "back to the taxes that prevailed under Jimmy Carter, when the highest tax rate was 70%."  By adding together every tax increase that any Democrat is currently proposing, along with every increase implemented under Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, he gets to an ill-defined "tax rate" of 62%.  That's hardly 70%, (or the 91% top marginal income tax rate that prevailed under Eisenhower), but what's an extra 8% among scare tacticians?   

Moore would have us believe that federal taxes have been climbing relentlessly since the halcyon days of Reagan's second term, when the top marginal income tax rate was, he says, 28% (it was actually 33% in a bracket below the top bracket).  Never mind that federal tax revenue as a percent of GDP is currently lower than it was at any point in the Reagan years, and is in fact at its lowest point since the early 1950s. To paint this picture, Moore needs almost one distortion per paragraph. A sampling: