It's Teatime

Well, that was a fun senseless debacle.  

Sometimes, in the midst of these political jujitsu grapples, it's easy to lose sight of the essential issues.  To the people on the right, the issue is Teh Debt.  Everything, they claim, is insignificant compared to the one defining priority -- reducing the national debt by any means necessary.  That's why Obama (or any Dem president) is by definition, unnacceptably evil -- because any president, inheriting the recessions and the wars of the previous president -- would be presiding over a country where the debt is increasing.

That brings me to my bullet points.  This is why Teabaggers are WRONG.

1.) To imagine that any president could have assumed the office in 2009 and immediately slashed the Federal Debt is insane.  It couldn't have happened without crippling the country.  Stop dreaming that this was somehow a plausible idea.

2.) The only way to decrease the Debt is steadily, over time, through a combintion of increased revenue, cuts to entitlement programs, the elimination of waste, and a reduction in the defense budget.  Democrats have compromised on entitlements, but Republicans have refused to do the same when it comes to taxes and defense.  They demand not ONE penny in higher taxes, and not ONE penny cut from the Pentagon -- because the Republicans take their orders from billionaires who don't like paying taxes, and defense companies like Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, etc.  Let me just state this again -- the Republican Party works for billionaires, and ONLY billionaires.  Ever since the Reagan era, they've been pursuing a long-term strategy of using deficits as an excuse to eliminate programs they don't like.  The government is in debt?  How awful!  Sure, we could raise the capital gains tax or eliminate some defense programs, but why even think of doing that when you could eliminate the EPA, gut the IRS, and kill the departments of education and energy?

The Republican Party uses crisis as an excuse to pursue things only found on the Billionaire's Wish List.  And thanks to talk radio, they've very successfully fooled millions of blue-collar people into supporting their aims.  Seriously, as we speak, there are rednecks in poor rural areas who feel very strongly that the EPA needs to die, not because they've EVER dealt with the EPA, but because they've absorbed their masters' propaganda.  It... is... sickening.

3.) Of course, the Republican party is now two parties, and the supposedly-insurgent Teabaggers are just as bad in these respects as the old guard conservative elites.  They think they're different, but when it comes to compromise, they both take the same hard line -- all the money we need to save must come from social spending, and not one penny from the Pentagon or the Koch Brothers' capital gains.  The old elites used to demand tax cuts and deregualation under the guise of "it's better for the economy, and you'd better give us what we want unless you want everyone to suffer."  The new teabagger elites now demand tax cuts because they've listened to too much Mark Levin, fetishize the Revolutionary era, and pursue some fever dream of "doing what the Founders intended."  Because the Founders were infallible beings of pure light and goodness, i suppose.

This supposed civil war in the GOP amuses me, because both sides are equally as vile.  It's a bit like watching radical Sunnis and radical Shiites kill one another because they both want to be the only genuine crazy cult in town.

4.)  Nobody believes that you know anything about prudent tax policy when you act like the teabaggers do.  When you dress up in tricorne hats, adorn yourselves with Lipton bags, carry racist signs, and are obsessed with sideshow issues -- Obama's a muslim, abortion, FEMA deathcamps, UN oppression, fluoride in the water... you don't look or sound serious.  You look like a bunch of loons.  

That's pretty much it.

Accept some higher taxes on the rich.  Accept some cuts to defense.  Stop making youselves look stupid.  We can totally deal.

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