Obama to meet Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, McConnell Friday to discuss sequester.

That’s all well and good, but if Cantor has his way, the GOP in the House will block a deal and claim that it’s for the good of the party (just as he’s done twice before with no benefit inuring to the GOP.

Right now, the GOP owns the sequester, even as they try to claim that it’s all on Obama. Obama has promised that the sequester wouldn’t take effect, but that was wishful thinking that the GOP would come to its senses and stave off the across the board cuts because it would be bad to the nation’s economy. That was a bad bet on his part.

The GOP has multiple personality disorder when it comes to the sequester. I’ve heard variations of the following across Twitter and news reports (sometimes from the same person uttering them):

1) The sequester wont be as bad as Obama and Democrats claim, but Obama owns all that is wrong with the sequester.
2) The sequester fulfills a long term goal of GOPers, so they’re not opposed to having it take effect.
3) The sequester wont have any effect on the provision of services, so why not let them take hold.
4) The sequester must be avoided at all costs - and it’s Obama’s fault for not caving to GOP plans for more cuts.

There are variations on those themes too, but the whole GOP basis for the sequester discussion is to maximize the damage it does to Obama and Democrats, and the economy gets screwed in the process, even as most economists agree that the across the board cuts are the wrong approach to dealing with the deficits (and it’s not like the GOP wasn’t about running up huge deficits just a few years ago when they were in power by pushing tax cuts and spending hikes - in part through the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan).

There was no interest in fiscal responsibility then - and the idea of fiscal responsibility being proffered by GOPers now smacks of hypocrisy.

They’ve pushed tax cuts to the exclusion of all other policy options, even though tax cuts have helped push the nation into the debt mess we have.

But the GOP sees even the 2013 tax deal to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts (2001/2003/2009 Obama extender) as a tax hike because the top earners now have to pay more income tax than under the 2009 rates (which is still lower than the historical top tax rates). They are fighting the tax plan by Democrats in addition to spending cuts because they are now claiming that the 2013 deal covered all the taxes they’re willing to touch, which is just flat out nuts.

And in the end, people understand that the GOP owns this mess (as the polling all indicates).