From Washinton Monthly, with comments in boldface following from today's Dailykos.com:
When House Republican leaders unveiled their Pledge to America in September, it included a pretty striking promise to voters -- if elected, the GOP majority would "roll back government spending" by "at least $100 billion in the first year alone." [...]
Monday, Republicans started slowly backing away from their $100 billion commitment. Yesterday, the pledge was effectively thrown out the window.
Many people knowledgeable about the federal budget said House Republicans could not keep their campaign promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending in a single year. Now it appears that Republicans agree.
Now aides say that the $100 billion figure was hypothetical, and that the objective is to get annual spending for programs other than those for the military, veterans and domestic security back to the levels of 2008, before Democrats approved stimulus spending to end the recession.
Oh, I see. Republican pledges are "hypothetical" promises. The Pledge to America must have included asterisks and disclaimers in font so small, the country missed the caveats.
Of course another thing the country missed was the traditional media challenging the GOP to identify specific spending cuts rather than just providing them with a platform to peddle their collection of talking points.
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