And you would be right. We, as a nation, do want to stop. But there's about seven hundred people in Washington D.C. who don't share our sentiment. Ironically, they are the elected officials we've sent to Washington in order to do the exact opposite of the things they actually do.
Here's a nice recap of what those seven hundred people have done to us all this time:
The basic idea here is when Congress pulled the bullshit move of holding our debt ceiling hostage, the deal struck to avoid that particular punch to the junk involved $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years. Half the cuts come from social programs, the other half from defense. The cuts were considered so widespread and ill-conceived that people in their right mind would never let them go through. A Congressional "super-committee" convened to get down to brass tacks and finally get these economic stalemates behind us. Sure, Congress as a whole couldn't get their act together but certainly this bi-partisan sub-section could.
Nope, they failed as well, dooming us to a fate that could only be avoided if Congress would just admit their plan is stupid and shouldn't be carried out. But like two primates pounding their chests and flinging their own feces, the democrats and republicans have focused their attention not on the problem, but on the messaging.
"The Messaging" is one of those phrases that makes me throw up a little. President Obama takes his side of the argument to the masses, giving rally speeches and meeting with state governors to get everyone to start yelling about how much this sequestration stupidity will needlessly hurt. The president had his former republican congressman FAA head hit the circuit to talk up the damage.
LaHood: FAA furloughs will be necessary if sequester takes effect
Here's an example of the GOP's response:
First, I have to get this picture out there from the Daily Kos article I just linked.
Here's a lot of what irks me in a nutshell. First, a shameless photo op involving the stereotypical "standing together." Second, the hashtag desperate rebranding of sequestration into the "we really hope this stupid made-up word catches on" Obamaquester (for what it's worth, the stupid made-up word didn't catch on). Third, the doomsday clock for dramatic effect. In the end, all the sound and fury signifying nothing isn't getting us closer to a solution, it's making sure one side smells slightly less worse when they crawl out of the sewage.
What's also interesting via total sadness... news sources are now covering the reaction to the story instead of the story itself. It feels very postmodernist or "meta" but it also feels like a disservice. That Daily Kos piece wasted ink on covering polls that tracked who the public perceives to be more at fault while dressing down the fact that just over 90% of people asked basically blame Washington. Apparently the 10% with "no opinion" means that politicians must have been sampled as well given their lack of enthusiasm for solving the sequestration problem.
All of the political toilet flushes occurring right now dance around the fact that we have only a few days left before we are forced to eat our own bullshit perpetrated by these D-level drama clowns you see in the picture above. Many current Congressional republicans should not be in office... they don't deserve the jobs they've been entrusted to. Just look at the recent Chuck Hagel "Friends of Hamas" accusations that recently got kicked around. Or this piece from the Rachel Maddow Show about Senator Ted Cruz and some of his cohorts:
It's a long clip but worth it in my mind. The shorter version comes from the New Yorker article that inspired the above clip:
Essentially, Senator Cruz fabricates bullshit about someone and then demands that person responds to the damning bullshit allegations. It got so bad when Cruz was questioning Hagel that even some fellow republicans thought Cruz veered off the path too far. We deserve better representation to solve the real problems our country faces (and to not fabricate fake problems to distract from and compound the real ones).
Also, let's not forget that Congress wasn't in session - at all - last week... the last full week before sequestration kicks in.
What's tricky in this case is that both sides have a point. Republicans want government spending to stop spinning out of control. A lot of politicians talk about how that needs to happen and it never does, not in a smart, meaningful way (two things the sequestration isn't). Republicans and Democrats both lack the stones needed to carry through on efforts to get our government budgets under control. But a new breed of Republican is now taking over in Washington, and what they lack in smarts, they more than make up for in dedication to the idea that government is too big and wasteful. The sequestration is their chance to finally have something happen that they truly believe in.
Of course, never mind that one of the easiest ways to shrink the national debt is through economic growth and the sequestration will most likely accomplish the opposite. Sweeping the legs out from under a fragile economy may accomplish some degree of government fiscal restraint, but I bet the overall effect will push Tea Party elected officials further from their goals. It's possible that borrowing interest-free and reinvesting in massive amounts of infrastructure projects would prove more successful even though it might seem counterintuitive on some rudimentary level.
I don't know when it became required for elected officials to strap on blinders when approaching a problem, but here we are. In the classic 1993 film, Rising Sun (based on the novel by Michael Crichton), Sean Connery says:
The Japanese have a saying, "Fix the problem, not the blame." Find out what's fucked up and fix it. Nobody gets blamed. We're always after who fucked up. Their way is better.
I whole-heartedly agree. Can we finally solve a problem instead of jumping through hoops to fix the blame? Will the media please stop worrying about "the optics" or "the messaging" and get back to the business of holding Capitol Hill morons' feet to the fire?
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