AP: "GOP policies led to fiscal cliff blowup" - Republicans Are The Cause of Federal Dysfunction

It is so rare that a news publisher deviates from the false equivalency that infects journalism today and calls out Republicans for growing increasingly extreme and out of touch. Indeed, the corporate media rarely highlights statements by prominent Republicans like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush who said his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and Reagan would have a hard time being nominated by today's Republican activists.

http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-gop-policies-led-fiscal-cliff-blowup-222503056--politics.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans seem shocked by their party's meltdown on the so-called fiscal cliff. They shouldn't be.

The uncompromising conservatives who blocked Speaker John Boehner's tax bill were merely sticking to policies that Boehner and nearly all other GOP leaders have pushed, without reservation, for years: It's always wrong to raise tax rates on anyone, no matter how rich. The nation's big deficit is entirely "a spending problem, not a revenue problem." And in any deficit-reduction plan, spending cuts must overwhelm new revenues, by 10-to-1 if not more.

To be surprised by Boehner's failure is to assume one of two things. Either House conservatives didn't really believe their party's bedrock principles; or they would compromise after seeing President Barack Obama win re-election on a deficit-reduction plan that called for higher taxes on the wealthy.

Neither was true. And now the Republican Party is reeling from unbending fealty to its core principles.