Super-Fail By Design
– by David Matthews 2
Failure.
That’s what the all-mighty “Super-Congress” has been forced to admit and adjourn without doing what it originally said it was supposed to. It was supposed to whip Congress into shape and come up with ways to trim the federal budget, bypassing the usual games played by Senators and Congressmen of secret holds and secretly-inserted “earmarks” and filibusters. And to give this “Super-Congress” some teeth, they threw in a poison pill codicil that says that if the “Super-Congress” cannot come to terms, that an automatic across-the-board cut would devastate federal programs right and left. Nothing would be spared. Every pork program would be on the line.
Only now, this past week, after all that bluster about “bipartisan cooperation”, we have the “Super-Congress” , now being referred to as just a “super-committee”, admitting that it can never come to terms on how to deal with its own reckless spending ways. Oh, and that poison pill codicil? Well they’re going to find ways to get around that. Plus President Obama has said he will veto that poison pill if it comes to his desk.
And thus the reign of the “Super-Congress” comes to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. The all-mighty deal that nobody supposedly wanted but everyone ended up with in order to sustain an artificial debt ceiling has been broken. The “truce” is dead. Détente has ended. It’s time for teeth-gnashing and chest-pounding and crocodile tears from self-important morons just in time for the 2012 Presidential Election season!
Why should we be surprised?
Seriously, why should any of us be surprised that this so-called “Super-Congress” would fall through?
First of all, all of the GOP members of this “Super-Congress” were hand-picked cronies from Grover Norquist’s K-Street PAC. They all promised to their dying breath that they would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, even if the world were to come to a painful end without it, do anything that would be considered a tax increase. In other words, if a limited-time tax break were to expire as designed, that’s considered a tax increase. If you remove an exception or exemption, that’s considered a tax increase. Their tax extremist mindset is so strict that if Wal-Mart doesn’t honor a competitor’s coupon, then that can be considered a tax increase.
This guarantees that there is only one agenda for this “Super-Congress” to take, and that is slashing government spending and government programs. Under normal circumstances, this is a good challenge to have. But these are not normal times.
Despite the lies being spun by the media and by those in Washington, the whole world is still in the grip of the Great Recession. We have whole nations on the brink of collapse right now, and the perpetrators of our collective misery are being allowed to get away with their criminal acts. As long as we are in that economic death spiral, anything to try to get us out of this Raubwirtschaft mindset will involve government funding at some level, because the business world, quite simply, refuses to do their part. And that, in and of itself, defies conservative thinking.
Plus the conservatives are far from being the budgetary hawks that they fraudulently claim to be. Sure they’ll talk tough about waste, and they’ll nitpick at every program they personally don’t benefit from. But they also know that they have a war fetish to satisfy. The march to fascism requires continued war, and conservatives still have plenty of countries around the world to declare war on. But they cannot scream until they are blue in the face about deficit spending and then take a breath and then scream equally loud about wanting a blank check for Homeland Security and a blank check for the War on Bad Guys Who Aren’t Christians and a blank check for the War on Drugs Not Sponsored By Big Pharma and a blank check for the War on Anything That Offends Christian Groups. That kind of hypocrisy may work inside the Washington beltway, but for those of us who have to live in the real world, that’s called “sending mixed messages”.
But even putting that aside, there is the very idea of a so-called “Super-Congress” (as it was called then), or a “Super-Committee” (as it is called today), or whatever the buzzword for it tomorrow will be. The very thought of a group making the big decisions for the rest of Congress, bypassing all the ego-driven self-serving tricks that Congress incorporates into every action today, given the power to control taxes and spending? That’s sacrilege in their putrid and corrupt minds! That’s like asking them to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or giving the President real line-item veto power. Their heads would implode before they allow that to happen!
Let’s get brutally honest here… this whole charade of a “Super-Congress” was designed to fail! It was crafted by power-mad members of the GOP and incompetent Democrats to give all the appearances of bipartisan co-operation while their selections made it clear that there would be no co-operation. All it did was to stall the drama for a few more weeks.
The GOP and the Obama Fail painted themselves into a nasty political corner with the whole artificial “debt ceiling crisis”, and they needed a way out, so that’s what they came up with. It was a scam from the beginning. It’s clear through their actions that they had no intention of really dealing with the budget; they just wanted the excuse to complain about it without the pressure of actually producing anything.
The only thing more insulting is the knowledge that this is precisely what the voters voted for. As long as they continue to vote for either the GOP or the Democrats, as long as they listen to the lies that those are the two options when their own ballots prove otherwise, then this is precisely what they will end up getting. As long as they continue to delude themselves into thinking someone else’s incumbent is the problem but never their own, then this is precisely what they will end up getting.
Ultimately the failure is ours. We voted for this in previous elections, and we will probably vote for this again in next year’s election. We got precisely the government we voted for.
But it isn’t a failure for everyone. It certainly isn’t a failure for either the career politicians or for K-Street crowd like those represented by Mr. Norquist. They’re the ones unfurling the “Mission Accomplished” banner and are eagerly awaiting the next artificial crisis to burden the rest of us with.
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