OH YEAH…HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN ALRIGHT

11/22/11

The committee of super poltroons, formed by a timid Congress in its latest effort to avoid the responsibility that comes with taking their public paychecks, failed to achieve the paltry ($1.2 trillion) it was charged to find. The utter failure of this pack of hyenas came as no surprise to most people or to any readers of the Insightful Pontificator.

Consider these numbers for a moment. Unless there is something wrong with my math or my understanding of the cuts, $1.2 trillion over ten years amounts to $120 billion per year out of a budget that totaled, in FY 2011, $3.6 trillion. That works out to 3% of the FY 2011 budget, which will, of course, grow, making the $120 billion an even smaller percentage of future budgets. So this Superdolt Committee could not cut the budget by 3%! I digress, but I do so to reinforce a very important point: These guys can’t cut anything. Even the guys who scream and holler about how important it is to cut spending cannot find any spending they would like to see cut. We are doomed.

Now that the committee has crashed and burned, the Congresspersons who designed this abomination before God and man are busying themselves with removing the sanctions, in the form of $1.2 trillion in mandatory cuts, split evenly between “defense” and domestic spending, that are to kick in, but not until 2013 when the elections are safely behind our public servants. The War Party, led by estimables John McCain (Did you know he was a POW in Vietnam?) and Lindsey Graham are in full whoop-whoop, equating any suggestion of removing any dollars at all from the defense budget with treason. Democrats are doubtless doing the same thing about programs that address “vital needs” that seem to arise when the money becomes available, or, in modern American political parlance, when such spending can be slipped by a prime time network TV addled American public, which is always, but, again, I digress.

President Obama, on the other hand, has pledged to veto any effort to undo the mandatory cuts; he wants to keep the pressure on Congress to do something about our deficit problems. So we find ourselves in the odd position in which it is President Obama who is the proverbial adult in the room. We are, ladies and gentlemen, in deep, deep trouble when Barack Obama is the adult in the room.

Humor was not my sole objective in writing that last sentence. In the old days, when this country was great, a guy with President Obama’s limited background (“community organizer,” one and a half term state senator, two-thirds of a term U.S. Senator, and no, zero, private sector experience of any type) would not even qualify to be an obscure back bencher in Congress. Now, in our society preoccupied with “Dancing with the Stars” and Jay Cutler’s thumb, he is President of the United States, and now the mature, wise man in a Washington pullulating with preening poltroonish popinjays who would not ponder a position in the private sector, carnival barkers, chicken head chomping circus geeks, overeducated and underachieving ingénues whose most salient features are their lack of humility and their certainty of their having all the answers, and other assorted hangers-on and self-important twits and fops.

And then we have this same cast of mountebanks and charlatans piously intoning that the “American people” want action, the “American people” want a responsive Congress, the “American people” want to do something about the sorry fiscal shape of their government. I have news for these professional caitiffs and bloodsuckers: it is the “American people” who sent you carnies in suits to the Washington. The “American people” want to be left alone to anesthetize their brains with the likes of “Mike and Molly,” “Two Men and a Boy,” “Poor Girls,” or whatever these glaring examples are called of the utter decline of our society to the public debauch of indifference and overindulgence it has become.

This country is finished, done, over with. Certainly, the estimables in Washington have had a great deal to do with the decline of this once great country. But far more culpable are the people who sent them there. Self-government takes work, sacrifice, and attention to one’s duties as a responsible citizen in a self-governing polity, not shameless self-indulgence, insufferable, dolorous whining, and feckless, gormless displays of crass materialism.