The Republic is safe.
John Boehner’s no national dictator, we now know, set to ruin the economy by forcing it off the fiscal cliff in the same way that Rep. Paul Ryan did to that poor old lady in a wheel chair on TV.
No, Boehner’s got other ways to screw up the economy, ones that have the happy effect- for him- of keeping the government vortex flowing and sucking in all the money it can.
The modest, emotional, cigarette-smoking Speaker of the House, you see, uses force only against conservatives who wish to stop the vortex, not against his ideological “opponent” over at the White House who argues for an even louder sucking sound in our economy.
Outmaneuvered, outsmarted and outrageous, the new, old, white face of the GOP, Mr. Speaker Boehner, isn’t negotiating with Barack Obama on the myth called the fiscal cliff.
Rather, he’s capitulating.
And so, there will be no GOP elephants scaling the snow-covered Appalachians to fight out the budget battle on the Potomac.
Not since the poilus surrendered to Hitler in 45 days has an opponent backed up so much talk with so little fight.
It’s taken Boehner less than 40 days to meet Obama on the field of battle and be completely vanquished.
To cover for his failure, Boehner has attempted a strategic retreat to avoid the appearance of total defeat. But he got more retreat than he bargained for, and so now total defeat for the GOP will be thrown in for good measure.
Viva la France!
That’s because Boehner tried “negotiating” with Obama when he should have been fighting him. And Mr. Speaker was fighting his own caucus when he should have been negotiating with them.
Arranging your generals to fight is the order of battle you follow when you want to win.
But moderate Republicans, like Boehner were eager to negotiate with Obama as one step on their way to surrender, as if they had it all planned out. Why fight when you can get the tax increase you want by doing nothing?
GOP politicians who weeks before agreed that the most ruinous thing we could do to our economy was increase taxes, now agreed that maybe a tax increase on the dirty, rotten rich wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
You know? It’s only money.
To help the surrender along, the non-partisan, but all-government Congressional Budget Office released its newest work of fiction, The Fiscal Cliff- which is more myth than cliff, but certainly ready to be adapted for TV. .
“Once upon a time,” the fairy tale started, “there was a misunderstood budget deficit looking for a tax increase. This tax increase was TOO big; that tax increase was TOO small; but the one on the rich was JUST right!”
In Washington, that’s considered a happy ending- and just in time too.
Like any good adventure story, The Fiscal Myth story has the added importance in that it has to beat the clock. Tick, tick, tick the clock clicks in the background, reminding us of the danger, the Tea Party bad-guy holding a bloody razor ready to cut government spending in it’s dangerous war on women, children and puppies.
So then, the story goes, NOW you replace $500 billion in tax increases with a trillion dollars or more – oh, goody!- in new taxes and you guarantee that year-over-year government spending will never go down!
The frog becomes a prince. The princess becomes an ogre.
The deficit and the tax increase live happily ever after, forever and ever and ever in the swamp they call DC.
And, voila, the Republic is safe from the fiscal cliff myth.
While France surrendered only half their republic to Germany, look for the politicians in Washington and on Wall Street to surrender the entire US Republic in the name of avoiding a recession.
But even so, after losing the Republic, we’ll still get the Great Recession thrown in for good measure.
Because while Hollywood believes in happy endings, Washington never wants the myth to end, happily or not.
Ransom Talks About Fiscal Cliff Surrender on Fox Business and yeah, he's mad.