Sacrilege Towards Blessed Karl
The increasingly intense intra-GOP bickering over Social Security tactics, strategy and substance continues, and is rapidly descending into finger-pointing now that the whole campaign appears to be heading south faster than a Purdue student on spring break.
I'll let Josh Marshall chronicle the rich harvest of the anti-privatization campaign he helped rev up, but I did see an interesting example of how nasty the Republican divide on this issue has become. This is from a Bob Cusack piece in today's edition of the Washington insider tabloid, The Hill, which quotes the chief architect of the House GOP's incredible free lunch proposal to dump half of all payroll taxes into private accounts with no benefit cuts and no new revenues:Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) who is credited as the author of the Ryan-Sununu bill, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Times two months ago that mocked the White House for trying to send the president out to sell personal accounts with a message that they don’t really solve the problem. Ferrara wrote, “Is it any wonder then that the more George W. Bush talks about personal accounts the lower they sink in the polls?” Ferrara told The Hill he is trying to help Republicans get on track on Social Security. He accused top Bush administration officials — including Rove and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card — of urging people to tell him to “shut the hell up.”
Ferrara, who is scheduled to testify on Social Security before the Senate Finance Committee today, said Rove, Card and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Josh Bolten lack expertise on the entitlement system and mistakenly believe some Democrats are close to embracing the president’s plan.
“Rove thinks he’s been beatified by the last election,” Ferrara added.
Even in today's GOP, is nothing sacred?
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