Fly the friendly skies? Or sit on a cold, hard bench at Terminal B for two hours. Yesterday, travelers fumed at flight delays in airports throughout the country, as air traffic controllers struggled to manage incoming and outgoing flights with 10% fewer staff. The New York Times reported long waits of up to two hours on the first day that mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts went into effect. Although the Federal Aviation Administration cautiously say it’s “too soon to tell,” the pilots, gate agents, and other employees were “quick to blame” the cuts.





The sequester strikes again, and the folks on Capitol Hill don’t like it. Especially those of the Republican persuasion. These callous, anti-government budget-slashers couldn’t care less about stressed-out air traffic controllers precariously juggling an impossible workload on the job, and then going home and struggling to balance their checkbooks on their reduced pay checks. But they apparently do care about being inconvenienced when traveling between Washington, DC and their home towns. As news about the long waits at airports across the nation, GOP leaders were quick to blame President Barack Obama — as if he were personally sitting in an air traffic control tower and preventing pilots from taking off or landing their planes.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) grumped on his @GOPLeader Twitter feed:

Why is President Obama unnecessarily delaying your flight? FAA can reprioritize. wapo.st/10tBPgV #ObamaFlightDelays — Eric Cantor (@GOPLeader) April 22, 2013

House Speaker John Boehner joined the blame fest on his @SpeakerBoehner Twitter feed by accusing the president of actually cutting the air traffic controllers’ hours, instead of cutting “other spending”:

.@wsj editorial: POTUS furloughing air traffic controllers “rather than cut other spending” j.mp/Y1qgfC #ObamaFlightDelays — Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) April 23, 2013

As Rachel Maddow explains on her MaddowBlog, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of how Republicans feel about the deep budget cuts mandated by the sequester:

They came up with the idea, then condemned it, then embraced it, then blamed President Obama for it, then celebrated it as a “victory.”

Cantor and Boehner claim that the FAA could have found other ways to trim their budget, but they offer no suggestions. In this, Republicans are a lot like the American people, who say they want to cut “wasteful” government spending, but can’t agree on what to cut (as reported in the Huffington Post). Then again, the GOP started the whole idea of government spending being wasteful in the first place. The Washington Post reported that when presented with a list of programs to cut, the majority of Americans don’t want to cut any of them.

When it comes to the negative effects of budget cuts mandated by the sequester, Rachel Maddow thinks the GOP should put up or shut up:

Of course, if Republicans no longer like the effects of this deeply stupid policy, they could agree to just turn the darn thing off, and stop undermining the economy and hurting the country on purpose.

The GOP has been trying to starve the government beast for decades. Now that they’ve succeeded, they’re discovering that neither they nor their constituents like it … and now they’re trying to blame the president and the Democratic party for the cruel, senseless, and unworkable policies they’ve forced on the American people. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) released a video of himself bloviating on the Senate floor, which perfectly encapsulates his party’s stinkin’ thinkin’.

Here’s the video: