Belly flopping off the fiscal cliff; or how I lost the capacity for rational thought

The laundry list of right wing complaints post fiscal cliff has been amusing to observe – all of the big gun conservative commentators have weighed in on the madness sure to follow what, in their minds was an ill-advised decision to let common sense prevail and maintain some semblance of dignity in the congress.  Now they are in hot pursuit of the Deficit / Liberal / Obama boogie-man with torches held high, in full throat, giving us a good excuse to once again examine and break down the reasons for their concern.  There are many such voices in the media these days but I will try to stick to those who I am pretty confident are not hallucinating regularly but whose partisan freak-flag is flying high just the same.

Victor Davis Hanson, eminent Hoover Institution historian and right-wing hack, published an article recently titled  “2012: Call it the year when dreams died” an ominous sounding rehash of everything wrong in the world and why it is all the fault of Obama or other liberal impulses, all of which have suspicious origins and will surely doom us left unchecked by the wise men of the right – like himself.    And while thumbing through a laundry list of left-wing folly, dismissing legitimate concerns about - as he derisively calls them - “the most vulnerable”, (as if they don’t really exist and are just a figment of deluded liberals’ imaginations), perpetuating the wild-eyed right-wing conspiracy fantasy about Benghazi and justifying the paranoid Brown-shirts leading the NRA, he compares Obama to Nixon in a wild swing and a miss attempt to further demonize him.  Never mind that Hanson probably voted for Nixon both times  he ran - he tries to make the logically questionable case that  the two were equally venal and criminal and worthy of contempt.  This is - of course - laughable in its entirety.  Obama is nothing more than a 1974-vintage moderate republican who only looks like a bug-eyed frothing spawn of Fidel Castro when compared to dangerous lunatics who have seized control of the modern republican party.  

He goes on to somehow equate Obama’s re-election with the crash of the Greek economy, the election of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, the overblown, sputtering fireworks being launched to great and emotional fanfare in North Korea and Kim Slutashian carrying Kanye's love child.  Right, Vince – of course this all makes sense in your twisted world view.  Now climb back up into Hoover Tower and try to lie down for a while with a wet cloth over your forehead and when you wake up, there will be armed guards outside the kindergarten class room where your grandchildren are reading My Pet Goat in honor of the man most responsible for the  current and much ballyhooed “trillion dollar deficits” and Quetin Tarrentino will have seen the light and entered the seminary.

My local paper is full of letters and articles from sputtering right-wingers expressing bitter disappointment, particularly now that John Boner has finally acquiesced and cut a deal “to avert the dreaded fiscal cliff”, a phrase so ubiquitous as be rendered meaningless – the brittle-haired local news readers staring glassy-eyed at the camera could read it over and over and keep a straight face but that’s because they don’t seem to care much about what it is they’re reading.  For most other sentient beings the phrase is met with either a yawn or a roll of the eyes.  Memo to news producers everywhere; endless repetition of hyperbole turns it into just more verbal Fruit Loops for the hungry maw of 21^st century information consumer.  It – by turns – scares us or bores us but it doesn’t seem to motivate the knuckleheads in Washington.

For example, here is a letter suggesting that the deal was “typical Obama; punish the successful and reward the nonperformers”, as if this sums up Obama’s political strategy in one incoherent blast of thinly disguised racism. 

Here’s another lamenting that the “liberal media”, (could that include me???), has successfully cast republicans as “racists, homophobes, sexists, and gun-nuts”, a fairly accurate description as far as I can tell, at least in as much as the most vocal and influential voices on the party are concerned.  If you don’t like being portrayed that way, ask yourself how these clowns get elected?   This correspondent, who is the president of something called, “The Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley”, goes on to blame the media for the fact that the unprincipled representatives he presumably supports, ”betrayed their core beliefs” by voting for a deal with no spending cuts, evidently not paying enough attention to the hated media to notice that the spending cuts are yet to come and are being negotiated as this is written.  I know that the word "negotiation" is not in the republican lexicon anymore, which explains how fuming hatred trumps reasoned political dialogue once again.

The sad fact is that this imaginary crisis and its intellectual companion, raising the debt ceiling, does nothing more than distract the country from the real work of reform that most reasonable observers agree needs to occur.  If I am Obama now and see that the fired up tea party rabble are demanding dollar-for-dollar cuts to match the increase in the debt ceiling, I would propose line items cuts to a defense budget so bloated as to embarrass Jabba the Hut.  Here’s a news flash to the Three Corner Hat crowd; defense takes up over 50% of the federal budget.  Anyone serious about cutting need only take a hard look at the defense budget and the savings start leaping off the page.  Instead Paul Ryan and his ilk fuel their post-puberty obsession with Ayn Rand by suggesting the “nonperformers” be cast aside to fend for themselves so that the deserving can go and join the generals choking down turkey legs, warm stout and Cuban cigars.  

Instead of arguing about how long to extend unemployment benefits, take an aircraft-carrier’s worth of money and go build a bridge somewhere.  Reform the tax code so people and corporations aren’t rewarding for lying through their teeth and maybe you could lower some rates.   Stop wallowing in the institutional stupidity that seems to have spread through Washington like a cholera epidemic and try to form rational thought above the level of a four year old playing with an empty cardboard box.   Instead of screaming “No!!!” hysterically  every time Obama or the democrats suggest voting for something completely non-partisan and innocuous, like the Violence Against Women act, come out from under the covers, look around and see that the world is changing and if you insist of staying there in bed, sucking your thumbs and pouting, you will eventually be no more relevant to the current political process in this country than Henry Kissinger.