VP to Let

So, Vice President Biden charges the Secret Service rent for the use of the cottage near his Delaware home in order for them to better protect him and his family.

And to think, there probably never was a vice president the enemies of this country more wanted to keep alive.

No Comparison

And I can't believe it was Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) who made it.

On FOX News Sunday, Senator Kyle said this: "The tea party folks in the House who say they're standing on principle not to raise the debt ceiling remind me a lot of Senator Barack Obama who did the same thing -- voting against the debt ceiling increase when he was in the Senate."

I'm sorry Senator Kyl, but former Senator Obama's objection to raising the debt ceiling had nothing to do with a principled concern over the size of the national debt, a fact that has become all too clear with his, ahem, less than disciplined fiscal policies.  His point then, which was clear at the time, was a completely political and partisan one of sticking it to then President Bush and the GOP.

The Tea Partiers, by contrast, ran and were elected on a pledge to rein in deficit spending and get the national budget under control.  Their stand is not only consistent with that pledge, it is demanded by it.

This is a comment I would have expected from that other Arizona senator, you know the one, the Maverick, but not from Senator Kyl.  However, it does serve to demonstrate once again just how much the Senate, unlike the House, is a far too chummy club.

The case for term limits grows again.

The Truth...and it Hurts

NRO's Andrew McCarthy comes out swinging against the Boehner plan for all the obvious reasons and more.  The "more" is the key.  Pardon the long passage, but read it and, yes, weep if you must.

The pass we are at is not an avoidable disruption. It is a disaster that has already begun to unfold, reversal of which cries out for bold action. The Boehner plan, or any other scheme that balks at forthrightly dealing with our financial straits, merely makes it more likely that our nation cannot survive as we have known it. In the shorter term, the Boehner plan ensures that, when serious steps are finally taken, the metastasizing debt disease will be trillions worse, if not terminal. 

Equally wrongheaded as imagining that an existential threat can be allowed to fester untreated is the insistence on seeing the threat in political rather than substantive terms. 

There is no doubt about why we are in a crushing economic disruption. Yes, the proximate cause is President Obama’s unprecedented spending spree — his follow-through on the campaign promise to change America fundamentally. But today’s Republican establishment shoulders plenty of the blame. In the first six years of the George W. Bush administration — when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, with Speaker Boehner then among the GOP’s House leaders — the debt ceiling went from $5.95 trillion to $8.97 trillion. It had taken a decade (from 1987 to 1997) to increase the ceiling by the $3 trillion it took to get to $5.95 trillion. Republicans took only six years to do it again. Under President Bush, who has reportedly whipped GOP lawmakers to vote for the Boehner plan, the national debt rose by almost five trillion dollars, to $10.6 trillion — i.e., it nearly doubled. 

Bush’s profligacy pales by Obama standards. The current president is spending the nation into oblivion. He has taken less than three years to run up almost $4 trillion in debt. 

The most transparent administration in history doesn’t write down the positions it argues in closed budget meetings with congressional leaders. Senate Democrats, moreover, have stopped submitting annual budgets, though federal law requires them. Transparently, this is done to avoid an embarrassing paper trail, documenting trillions in deficits, projected as far as the eye can see. But you can’t non–paper over a catastrophe. The government now spends so much more than it takes in that 40 cents of every expended federal dollar is borrowed. 

This cannot continue. Every day it is not dealt with is a day that we punish future generations. “Deficit spending” is a euphemism. If we were honest, we’d call it “deferred confiscatory tax spending” — we blithely party like there’s no tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes, our children and grandchildren get stuck with the unfathomable bill.

None of this is mysterious. It is easily verifiable. You don’t need a degree in economics to understand it. In fact, it is well understood: The country’s grasp of our dire straits is one reason spendthrift Republicans were ousted from power in 2006 and 2008, and it is the reason why President Obama led his party to a crushing electoral defeat just nine months ago — one in which Democrats were swept from power in the House, now barely cling to control of the Senate, and were routed in state races across the country. 

Americans did not suddenly fall in love with Republicans. They remain wary of the GOP, and — as we’re seeing — for good reason. The electoral revolt was strictly a center-right nation’s revulsion against governance by the hard Left. Republicans reaped the benefits because they were the only alternative, not because the public is convinced that they’ve learned anything from their stint in the wilderness.

The main lesson that should have been learned but hasn’t been is this: While every issue has political overtones and consequences, that does not make every issue political in its essence. The debt-ceiling controversy is not, as Republican leadership and its cheerleaders maintain, about politics. It is not a matter of, “If we don’t handle this correctly, if we push this too far, if Americans think we’re too extreme, President Obama will be reelected.” The debt ceiling is about the debt, not about how politicians can optimally position themselves to evade accountability for the inevitable consequences of the debt.

With apologies to Leon Trotsky (yep, him of all people), you may not be interested in the debt, but the debt is interested in you.

Wait Just One Minute!

With the passage by the House of the Boehner Plan currently at great risk, far too many conservatives pundits are already playing right into the Democrats', along with their numerous friends in the elite media, hands.  It seems the "heavies" in this whole tawdry scramble to find some palatable way to raise the nation's debt ceiling and avoid the Apocalypse are the Tea Partiers after all, and especially the House members they helped elect.

Even the NRO's Mona Charen, normally rock solid, has gone wobbly, launching this invective against them:

The tea-party activists are excellent patriots, but during the debt-ceiling confrontation, some have displayed an obtuse and even vain rigidity.

Listen Mona, and all others similarly-minded as well, it's more than a bit obtuse of you to expect people who were elected precisely because they pledged not and never to compromise their principles, most especially when the heat was on, to do so now.

I'm willing to concede that Boehner and the House Republicans who agree to support his plan are all principled men and women.  In their estimation, the tactically correct move at this point is to pass this less than perfect bill and make the Democrats, for a change, react to it.  They may be right.

But they may be wrong.  American political history, the last 50 years or so anyway, is almost perfectly described by a long train of Democrat Party abuses.  That history has taught the Tea Partiers, as it should teach you as well, that making deals with Democrats is always dangerous, and often downright foolish.  Need I point out that when Reagan compromised with them in 1982 by raising taxes (just a bit), they never delivered on their promise to cut spending in return and Reagan regretted the deal the rest of his life?

No, the "heavies" in this story are, and must remain, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats.  Over the past two and one-half years, it is their incontinent spending and irresponsible management of the nation's fiscal policies, if one can call refusing to pass a budget at all  "management", that has lead us to this crisis.  Their stimulus-package-that-failed-to-stimulate has alone pushed the country almost one-trillion dollars closer to the current debt limit.

Meanwhile, Obama, Reid, and Pelosi somehow get to stand smuggly by, tapping their toes and drumming their fingers, insisting that it is the Republicans' responsibility to do something now.  This narrative must be challenged, again and again, as long as necessary.

You more "reasonable" conservative commentators are often reminding the Tea Partiers that because the GOP controls only one-half of one-third of the government, they must avoid the temptation to overreach, they must not assume they can actually govern from that very weak position.  But now you're effectively demanding that they do just that anyway, that it is somehow their fault if we reach Armageddon next Wednesday morning.

Look, everybody's tired, nervous, and maybe even a bit frightened just now.  This can lead to a feeling of helplessness which sometimes makes you look for relief by transferring your frustration with the other side onto someone else, perhaps even one of your very own.  You can't control the other side, but you can exert pressure on your ally. 

I would urge all you increasingly skittish scribblers to recognize this for what it is and then redirect your growing frustrations in this way:  Concede that men and women of good sense and good will can sometimes disagree.  Then point again your talented pens, always mightier than the sword, at the party most responsible for this mess.  Their name begins with a capital "D", by the way, not "T".

Is this Hooterville?

Remember that 1960s TV show Green Acres?  The one where Eddie Albert as attorney "Oliver Wendell Douglas" leaves Manhattan with his glamorous wife for "farm livin'" in Hooterville, USA?  The running joke on which the rest of the show's humor was based was that Albert was the only sane person in the community, while everyone else, including his wife, were more than a little weird, crazy, or just plain stupid.  But as he was absolutely alone in his sanity, and they, all of them, unified in their insanity, well, an absurd, topsy-turvy world ensued.

If you're too young to remember that show, the second Bob Newhart show, the one where he was an innkeeper in Vermont, had almost exactly the same premise.

Anyway, I sometimes feel like the Albert character as a I follow the news about the negotiations over whether, when, and how to raise the nation's debt ceiling.

How President Obama and the congressional Democrats, the very people who alone (i.e., without any Republican votes) are to blame for bringing us so soon to this crisis point due to their world class incontinent spending over the past two and one-half years, are treated by all concerned, most especially by the elite media, as somehow responsible parties in the on-going negotiations is, quite frankly, beyond my ability to respond sensibly.  As I say, I feel like Mister Douglas in the show.

So again I ask, is this Hooterville?  

X Marks the Spot

I'm curious.  Do you think there's any correlation between those who are supportive of the group currently agitating to remove the Christian cross from Ground Zero and those who were sympathetic a few months back to the construction of a Muslim mosque next door?

Just wondering.

The Tragic View

NRO's Victor Davis Hanson argues that the current crisis marks a turn, or re-turn, to the tragic understanding of the state's, each individual's actually, limitations and possibilities.

In hard times, as in war, questions arise that were once considered taboo. As we approach $15 trillion run up in aggregate national debt, and confront the reality of a welfare state that is predicated on flawed assumptions about everything from demography to human nature, a rendezvous with brutal reality is now upon us.

Another name for our "rendezvous with brutal reality":  The Great Reckoning