The game is almost over. The politicians have now wasted months agonizing over the debt ceiling, a period of time during which, a bleeding nation has gone into intensive care without the attention of the doctors. Nothing has been done about the debt ceiling but more important nothing has been done about anything else.
We are a country faced with major problems, economic and social and yet our elected leaders have spent the last three months arguing over a non-existent problem and more important they have come up with a non-existent solution.
On August first, if we are lucky, congress will pass a one-line law extending the debt limit to 2013 or the President will enact the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Nothing will be attached tom the one-ine law, mainly because nothing will be agreed on. But that’s good. The blizzard of plans and ideas that has inundated the process, all with winning political points as the goal, none with helping the country as the goal, will stop, and maybe, just maybe, we will be able to get a committee of not just bi-partisan but also at least semi-intelligent congressmen to sit down and make a serious try at solving the problem of the balance between deficit and national need.
In order for something like that to work, it will need a group of politicians who are able to put aside their political goals and concentrate on the nations economic and social goals, a not insignificant order to fill. And maybe while that small but hopefully functioning committee is doing its job, the rest of congress will get back to the business of running the country, something they have been ignoring since the last election.
So why did the long, exhaustive, wasteful process we have just endured fail? Most likely because the objectives of one group were not as stated. I have listened as numerous pundits asked over and over why the Republicans couldn’t say yes to any offer, especially when those offers were often more than they had asked for in the first place.
The answer is simple. Reducing the deficit was never their real goal. People like Boehner, McConnell and Cantor, while dishonest and disingenuous aren’t completely stupid. They understand that you can’t reduce the deficit without raising taxes. Hell, every mathematician, accountant and businessman in the country knows that. It’s just unbelievable that the Tea Party people are the only ones too stupid to understand it, but we’ll get back to them later.
The real goal of this debate, like the real goal of everything the Republican Party has done since January 20th 2009, has already been stated by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Grover Norquist and it is to get Barak Obama out of office. They don’t care if nothing is accomplished, so long as whatever they do, helps get rid of Obama. It’s a really classy, really patriotic goal. It reads something like, The Hell With the Country as long as we get Obama. If these people and their message inspires you to vote for them, you’re an idiot.
This is not the first time this phenomenon has presented itself. It first surfaced when Bill Clinton got elected and the Republicans went crazy, trying to pin something on Bill or Hillary. Clinton spent so much time fending off the phony Republican attacks he barely had time for recreational sex and even less to do his job. Still he managed to get rid of the deficit that existed before him, show a surplus and create the largest surge in jobs since WWII.
Then of course, came Bush & Cheney who sent the economy from a surplus to a trillion dollar deficit without counting the cost of the two wars to which, they also subjected us.
Now here is Obama and let’s face it the only reason Obama was elected in this country where bigotry is still a major factor, was that McCain/Palin promised to be an even a bigger disaster than Bush/Cheney.
So, the question is, what happened to the Republican Party I used to vote for? Why haven’t the saner heads and yes, there are still a couple of saner heads even if they are not evident; why haven’t they led? The answer is very simple, cowardice. They are all afraid of the Tea Party. The Tea Party, an accumulation of know nothings, bigots (don’t argue this, just read the signs at the next rally) and dissatisfied losers who have banded together to vote into office the largest group of uninformed, unintelligent, inept and governmentally incompetent congressmen in the history of the country.
Where did they come from, you ask and what is their mission?
A little history helps;
When Obama took office, he did so under a huge cloud. The nation was in the biggest recession since the Great Depression, housing was in the toilet, we lost 700,000 jobs in three months and we were engaged in two wars that were sucking the blood out of our national veins.
Obama had made promises during his campaign and maybe he was wrong to try and keep them, but he forged ahead and passed a health care bill and a financial regulation bill as his first acts in office. Maybe he should have attacked the unemployment problem first. Maybe he didn’t know how.
So for two years our two biggest, most immediate problems didn’t get solved. Why not? Partly because the president was fighting on another front, partly because the Republicans shut down his main attempt to fight unemployment when they cut out funding for The Stimulus Package leaving a solution that needed about $2 billion with a little over $700 million
So now here are all these people, many of whom, voted for Obama, who are out of work, who have lost their homes and who are very, very dissatisfied. Nobody is patient when they have a problem that needs a solution and these people were no different. Healthcare and Financial regulation are abstract concepts when you’re out of work and on the street. Feed the kids is the reality. These were people who had waded through eight years of Bush/Cheney’s nation screwing and now it looked like the same thing was happening again with Obama. So instead of having a little patience, instead getting behind the guy they had helped put in office, they turned around, completely disgusted and screamed, THROW THE BUMS OUT!
An understandable situation except that instead of paying attention to who would replace the bums, they just voted for any lame brained loser who put his hand up. A perfect example of this was Christine O’Donnell, a low-grade moron with a touch of serious insanity who Tea Partiers pushed to defeat Republican incumbent Mike Castle simply because he had been there before. And of course, she was easily crushed by Democrat Chris Coons. These were the kind of candidates they promoted across the board. Unfortunately, despite being just as loony, just as stupid as Ms O’Donnell more of them didn’t meet the same fate and now they are infecting the House of Representatives, wandering aimlessly about the floor with no idea how to govern or what to do except to say “no.” These are the people who have the Republican Party under their thumbs. These people who can’t do functional math, who don’t understand the principle of priorities, who think you can accomplish something by stamping your foot and demanding your own way; these are the people who want to run the country. Let’s hope that the voting public has seen what they hath wrought and understands it enough to set the record straight in 2012
If we have learned anything from the process that has just transpired it is that you live with your own mistakes, especially the ones you make in the voting booth. Let’s hope that we can survive despite them.