Debt and Stuff

There has been a cease-fire declared in Washington D.C. On one side, the deranged and fact-free hardliners - self-styled "Republicans" made a temporary retreat from their mission to destroy the thing they claim to love (hint: they live there). It's like watching a loaded troop ship being driven toward an iceberg by a crew of heroin addicts. A little more horse, Captain? Because we're all the troops on that ship, even out here in the rational world. The rational world is the place where we still have civil liberties and nobody dies of treatable illnesses because they can't pay for the treatment. But we also depend on the global economy, which would tank if the "Republicans" torch the place. In the irrational world, they let people die of poverty (or un-richness) and cut food stamps while increasing spending on Main Battle Tanks (in a world where none of our enemies has any). The Yokels in Congress have put themselves in full vest-of-dynamite mode. Mess with them and we all get it. It turns out that the American government runs on concensus. For most of the history of the country, most people could agree on the concept that when a political party wins an election, they get to do a certain amount of the things they want to do. Because they got more votes. From citizens. So the Senate could afford to have a filibuster rule, because neither side would abuse it. And when we need to make routine decisions, they get made and we move on. Not any more. Obama won the right to implement his weak-ass health care plan. It passed both houses of Congress. It got by the hard-right Supreme Court. But these "Republicans" are no longer into building a great experiment in democracy. That's so Eisenhower. Instead, they strap on the TNT and go for it. It's hard to watch, and it's hard to root for the other side; Obama runs the place to the right of Nixon.