Debt Ceiling: The Story is Missing Again

by paradox

There are indeed many vastly disquieting political elements to the ongoing political fiscal cliff train wreck that is the rancidly-not-fresh start of the second Obama Administration

After punting on the debt ceiling for 60 days the little people have to watch another spectacle that won’t produce one job for 2 months, yes, but there is no doubt some terrible deal will commence. President Obama has drawn yet another line in the sand that the debt ceiling is non-negotiable and no one believes him. That’s what happens when one constantly gives up on previously stated inviolate positions again and again, perceptions of honesty and adherence to principle plummet while the opposition gleefully looks forward to pushing you around again. Not good.

Many voices state gratitude should be in order since cuts to the social safety net did not occur. Well excuse me, I sorta assumed as a liberal Democrat that when a Democratic President is elected social safety cuts are in the Pluto realm of possibility, that my leadership would of course fight to expand the woeful inadequacy of our social safety “net.” Instead we get political fencing tactics over cultural and political treasures that look precisely like the behavior of a timid centrist Republican. Worrisome.

Somehow ignored is a vast country undercurrent of torment from wrecked marriages, broken and lost homes, substandard schools from lack of funds, and so many souls crushed in a wailing twist of lost dreams and fine careers with nothing to do. Americans need jobs and peace, how much of either came out all this crisis? Everybody hate Congress, Chris Christie said so eloquently, and as the little people desperately seek any solution in this stinking mess we get a lecture from pundit Michael Thomasky that, you know, a President has to get stuff done. Painfully dismaying.

But surely the most near-horrifying element is that the basic story is missing and lost. Eugene Robinson came close this morning stating that the fiscal cliff was a ridiculous doomsday mechanism of mental children, but why the cliff was so dangerous is again unstated: because it was supposed to solve a problem, the deficit.

What? How could something so terribly dangerous exist to solve something so terribly dangerous? It doesn’t work, and sure enough scant polling on the issue showed the public thought the cliff increased the deficit.

Nothing rationally works in the story or the scenario because the core issue of deficit is simple bullshit, the real story is that liars and charlatans made up a danger of deficit to lever attacks on the social safety net and to keep tax rates low. Our noxious corporate journalism corps simply won’t report it or call it out, and the President can’t because he bought into it with that “pivot to deficit” in 2011, the same political phase that scrapped plan B and attacked California cannabis clubs.

Now that this excruciating deficit rabbit hole is in its 25th month of producing not one job phase 2 is with us with the story missing again: the issue is not that the debt ceiling must be breached in negotiation, it’s that the Republicans have turned into vastly destructive radical freaks and are holding the country hostage over a tiny legislative technicality that was always automatically granted before.

That story has been sitting there in plain sight for 2 years but the US journalism corps will not report it, for that would mean they’ve “gone over to the liberal side” in how they deal with Republicans and in their perceived reporting. The President won’t push it because it destroys his fantasy of being above it all and getting along.

Pundit Michael Thomasky pissed me off yesterday, sneering that Democrats like myself expect a Captain Liberal to come along and stop all this insanity. My dear bitch of DC politics, with no liberal champion the country gets pivots to deficit and a nauseating scrotum massage of negotiation with radical Republicans who don’t give a damn about the little people or the country.

I get it, Thomasky so confidently stated. How reassuring present political tactics can be comprehended from this journalist, but the fool still can’t see or won’t see the story right in front of all us, the Republicans have turned into destructive lying radicals with nothing but pain in their hands. Their lever of current destruction is the debt ceiling.

You, sir, are totally perceived as a DC buffet-grazer solely devoted to shoving your nostrils into the butt cleavage of the powerful, sneering at the little people they need a captain as the country blows another $120 on the Afghanistan war, whistling out your ass about getting stuff done while you can’t even do your own job of reporting huge stories right in front of you. Did you get that, journalist?