The Debt Ceiling Fight – Tea Partiers’ Job Descriptions Include Mayhem!

For many years people have demanded,”Congress should just do its job!”  Often they mean “Why don’t you partisan hacks just sit your butts down and compromise?”  That’s a legislator’s job, isn’t it?  It’s time to recall that a significant portion of the present 112th Congress was elected to do just the opposite, particularly the Tea Party freshmen. So why now do so many voters, beltway pundits – and members of congress themselves – believe the primary “job” of Congress is to compromise, canoodle, and concur?  Well, frankly, that’s a false belief.  Even without the present debt ceiling controversy, in most truly important matters the real “job” of Congress is generally to not compromise; rather, it’s to embrace partisanship like a five year-old squeezes her favorite stuffed bear.  Remember too, another strong belief among us is “Elections have consequences!”, and it’s here that Tea Party high-handedness is best understood. In fact, . . . Please click “Read More” . . .

[In fact,] arrogant pigheadedness is their job description precisely because, firstly, they are who they are, and, secondly, “elections have consequences.” Let the devil take the hind-most — and, especially, the debt ceiling.

        Mr. Cantor interviews a TP applicant.

So, are you smarter than the  average turnip?  Did you pass  3rd grade American History?

“Being A Member Of Congress Is As Much A Diagnosis As A Job Description” (paraphrasing Anna Quindlen).  Folks often believe that Congresspeople, like any other working stiffs, have an official job description that includes a phrase something like “get stuff done.” Yet, no “official” job description exists for members of this presently besotted congressional occupation. Of course, there are constitutional provisions setting out the powers and limitations of the legislative branch (Article I), and there are internal congressional rules and ethics requirements that apply to their members. But job descriptions? Nada.

Whenever, as now, these major fiscal controversies come to the fore, most of us “default” to citing a job requirement that compels those pesky legislators to get together and schmooze out a compromise. Last November, though, our country engaged in another historic slash and burn campaign to see who could most abrasively shout down their least favorite candidate. Back then, we viewed our political rivals as bums incapable of rational thought, and quite possibly unable, without heroic staff assistance, to pull on their underpants in the morning. (The jury’s still out on Delaware’s erstwhile 2010 GOP Senatorial candidate, Christine O’Donnell.)

How’s about adding: “Resign”?

Just Be Business-Like And Do Your Jobs!  Somehow, now, however, after a massively divisive election, we ask these folks to sit crossed legged on the ground around a fire, to powwow reasonably, and deliver us from evil. Indeed, many of us contributed to the rancor now existing, yet, clearly, none so much as the Tea Party. They court rancor. They attract it, seemingly merrily. It’s their wheelhouse. The Tea Partiers led the way with fact-free notions of fiscal responsibility that basically amounted to cutting the federal government back to a slimmed down Coast Guard on jet skis.

It’s not that compromise wouldn’t be “nice,” or “preferred,” or “calming.” But in the last election, unlike most off-year elections, the stakes became quite high with bullheadedness in full gallop. And much of the country, sadly recall, thought Tea Party ideas boffo. Thus we have a bunch of newbies in the House, and a Rand Paul or two in the Senate, who still control nearly all discussion of the debt ceiling. Whether by utter economic ignorance, willful stupidity, rank selfishness, corporate toadying, or revolution baiting (my choice), these tricorn hatted fools are ready to dump our national economic stability into the harbor. And that ain’t tea.

My Job Description Is Four Words “Block, Hinder, Whine, Snort.”  If you want a job description for the Tea Party, that’s about it. As Gertrude Stein said in 1935 about her ancestral home in Oakland, “There is no there there.” These Tea Partying dingbats came to D.C. almost uniformly undereducated in virtually every essential subject matter and deeply “under-moralized” regarding the hopes and needs of most of their fellow citizens.

Regrettably, these amoral legislators were shunt off to D.C. by a group of matching constituents. Here’s their “job description” for these winning TP candidates: remain as hardheaded and uncompromising as Hitler (sorry, Mr. Godwin, but here he actually seems to fit). Regarding the debt ceiling, the deficit, and the budget, these TP’s have not disappointed (although, unsurprisingly, a scattering of U.S. securities-owners among their own voters are a bit nervous). The country at large, though, is plainly disgusted, but not nearly enough . . . and it’s not the fault of our citizenry.

George, is the comma really necessary?

I’m Just Talkin’ ‘Bout My G-g-g-generation . . .  Instead of attacking these intransigent Tea Party dunderheads as incessantly as they deserve, the D.C. beltway’s journalistic twiterati, with few exceptions, misinforms a country famished for analysis. Primarily, they unctuously opine, it’s “the GOP,” “the Dems,” “politics as usual,” and, remarkably, “the President” who are the primary stumbling blocks to a debt ceiling/deficit cutting compromise. They, we are told, resist compromise; they won’t just sit like adults and do their jobs. 

Indeed, the Tea Party is often mentioned as intractable, yet there’s unbalanced “reportage,” by and large, as reporters and t.v. newsertainment readers give the TP a pass. They barely attempt to hold them truly and publicly accountable, and fail to investigate and report the utter economic idiocy of the Tea Party’s so-called alternatives. And truth telling is desperately needed. After all, what these back benchers are doing is not simply blockading an earmark creating a U.S. Goat Racing Team. They are quite simply – and aggressively – throwing the nation into the abyss with a deranged Plan A, and with nothing more than “let’s see what happens” as its Plan B.

In a real sense, the TP’s have already won a major battle, if not yet the war. These back bencher kids with the beanies on their heads have, with their simplistic “job descriptions,” brought both houses of Congress and the presidency to a loud, screeching halt. Nothing offered by President Obama, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, or Speaker Boehner meets the demands of this sniveling band of punks. Although utterly unlike the generation The Who helped usher in, the Tea Partiers’ rantings remind me of my generation’s anthem, “My Generation” . . .

Why don’t you all f-fade away   (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say   (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation   (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-g-generation   (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

If this generation, the Tricorn Topped Congressloonies, succeeds in its goal of violently deconstructing the national government with nothing but fractured history and a rigid belief system to replace it, we’ll be in an America that, truly, the Founders could not have foreseen. The country they shed real blood for, courted public hanging for, and carefully nurtured, is now brought to the brink by a rabble of misinformed and misguided individuals who call themselves the Founders’ true believers. Would the Founders not reject such economic recklessness with the national debt and disdain for the common good?

Perhaps, though, should the debt ceiling collapse on their watch and cause what many believe will be a worldwide financial meltdown, the prime movers of this event, the Tea Party generation, will meet a comeuppance. Believers – if not scholars – as they are in history, they just may be reacquainted with another old American tradition:

I don’t know too many job descriptions that begin,

“WANTED.  Disgraced, tar and feather covered, undereducated, half daft former member of Congress needed to completely mismanage to bankruptcy a major corporation . . . “

Rupert Murdoch might be interested, though . . .