CNN:
Less than two weeks after one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, the No.2 Democrat in the U.S. House, Steny Hoyer, compared Republican tactics for dealing with the nation’s debt limit to someone threatening to shoot a child hostage.
“It’s somewhat like taking your child hostage and saying to somebody else, ‘I’m going to shoot my child if you don’t do what I want done.’ You don’t want to shoot your child. There’s no Republican leader that wants to default on our debt, that I’ve talked to,” Hoyer said at a Capitol Hill press conference.
Needless to say, this is the worst thing ever and the rightwing blogosphere has rushed to their fainting couches. There’s just one problem: Republicans have used the metaphor as well:
…As one senior Republican in Congress told me, “You don’t take a hostage you aren’t willing to shoot.” Republicans aren’t willing to kill the middle class tax cuts, even if extending them alone will make it harder to later extend tax cuts on the wealthy.
If Hoyer’s guilty of anything, it’s bad timing. But for conservatives to suddenly become deeply offended by the metaphor is insincere.
