At the same time, you have to admit this is damn-near perfect. It’s actually kind of Christmasy.
Let’s say I’m a ‘liberal’ U.S. representative. I can come back to Northeast Portland for the holiday recess. Since my constituents are short-sighted and suffer from memory issues, I enjoy the free pass I get for barely raising the issue during the nearly two years that Democrats controlled Congress not to mention a pretty powerful office a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol, a majority that Democrats managed to lose (oops!) in spite of their best efforts to behave like Republicans. So, I’d be off the hook for that. But when the organic, free-range, locally grown tomatoes were thrown at my office or at my Prius as I drove past on my way to an event with the word “sustainable” on the banner because my constituents were pissed off about my support of extending tax cuts for the fine people of, say, Lake Oswego, I could exclaim, without lying, oh no, no, what I voted for was to stand up for those without a voice, for those who have been systematically disenfranchised by the system.
Speaking of Lake Oswego, say I was a “conservative” U.S. representative, elected to preserve and defend the American spirit of entrepreneurship, the very foundation of this country’s greatness. I didn’t vote to further the Democrats’ socialist agenda: I voted because in the midst of a recession the last thing a responsible public servant would do would be to vote to increase taxes. I voted against continuing to take money away from Americans and give it to a government that has no sense of fiscal responsibility, a government that has no clue how to create jobs and put America back on the road to greatness. The extension of hand outs for the terminally shiftless, lazy and unemployed is a problem, to be sure, but it’s a temporary one, because, less than two years from today …
It’s all Obama’s fault. That’s the real beauty of it. The most amazing accomplishment of this knock-knock joke masquerading as legislative action, in my opinion, is that even though our senators and representatives have done exactly nothing in terms of standing up – or not – for their convictions, the opportunity for them to trash Obama is but a soundbyte away. He betrayed the liberals (again) and once again he’s tried to block any notion of progress, as they see it, put forth by the conservatives. And in so doing he’s given the people who make a lot of money to make “edgy” predictions and provide third-grade level analysis and insight on millions of television and computer screens across the land a lot of job security for the next 23 months.
And speaking of elementary blabber presented as analysis, here’s a little something: Does any of this matter? The figures rattle around in my mind, as disconnected and disjointed as a family gathering around the holiday supper table. A billion here, a few billion there, sometimes a trillion of this and that, and I’m speaking here not of the tax cuts but of deficit spending and cash borrowed from God knows where, which makes me wonder, is this kind of like buying property on the Monopoly board with fake money?
