- Extreme Budget Disgust

In the midst of my recuperation from food poisoning this week, I got a note from my buddy Tim, following up on a work issue that I’d let slide. He hadn’t heard of my illness at that point yet, so I explained that I’d spent more than few minutes unconscious on the kitchen tile and that I’d get to our outstanding issue as soon as I felt up to it. That was fine with him and he wished me well; exactly as you would expect if you knew him. But as an after thought, he included an insightful little quip about the threatened government shutdown.

He and I have spent more than a few minutes talking about inflation, hyperinflation and the key moments in the transition from one to the other. He was particularly interested in my best ideas on identifying that final ‘threshold event’ that should send you running for the mountain hideaway with your car full of ammo, gasoline and MRE’s. If you look at the history of Zimbabwe, the model for all ‘inflation ad absurdum’ economic basket cases I think it’s easy to identify. The ‘Holy $#!’ moment comes when the government can’t pay the soldiers anymore, and instead of an Army they instantly transform into a bunch of young (mostly single) guys with guns.

Anyway – Team Obama’s ‘emergency survival plan’ for the government shutdown involved not paying the troops – and Tim was calling my attention to the parallel. It’s not quite the same thing obviously. Even in a worst case shutdown the troops would have been paid eventually – when the congress got their act together. We aren’t that close to the fiscal cliff edge yet. But I had to admit it did raise some interesting questions in my mind.

I mean – if you aren’t going to pay the troops during a government shutdown doesn’t that by definition mean that they’re non-essential? How exactly can that be? Does that mean they can simply turn in their blackberry’s, walk off the job and come back to the battlefield when the dollars start flowing again? Surely we don’t just abandon all our FOB’s and let the troops work on their tans or get a pickup game going until the deal gets done do we?

No – of course not. Pay or no pay, we continue to require that they work. And if that’s so, then by any definition of the word, aren’t they in fact…‘essential’? Doesn’t that even meet the lofty ‘definition of the word is' scholastic metric so cherished by Democrats? I don’t mean to be too literal about it, but maybe some Liberal could explain to me when the words ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ end up meaning exactly the same thing.

Actually, maybe the moment we should be worrying about is when things are so desperate for the government that they no longer view the troops as ‘non-essential’. But even then I don’t expect we’ll be paying them right?

How about this: instead of requiring that the troops all work without actually paying them, how about we instead require that the people who make congress’s jobs all cushy not work at all. Send home all the congressional staffers, chauffeurs, secretaries, pages, pilots, waiters and other assorted camp followers. Don’t even let them volunteer their time. That should get the congress-critters working on a deal. In fact, let’s send home the Whitehouse and congressional security details and the entire secret service while we’re at it. Put that in the plan and we’ll never have another government shutdown again.

Not that I really mind a shutdown. To quote my man John Derbyshire in one of his more perfectly succinct moments: “Most of what government does is actually harmful, so we’d all be better off if they did a little less of it.” Maybe it was my poorly timed illness, but I was pretty much ambivalent on the shutdown until I heard Harry Ried speaking to the press about it. After that, I was absolutely convinced that we desperately needed a shutdown, and immediately.

How in the hell did a dim witted loser like Harry Ried end up as one of the most powerful men in the country?! How could it be so easy to make your way in Washington, that a condescending, disingenuous A-hole like him can slip on his kabuki mask and people will take him seriously? Why is it that the crowd doesn’t simply burst into uproarious laughter every time the man opens his mouth? How can 1/3 of the electorate have such a loose grasp on reality that his stupid, self congratulatory ideas can sound like they are in the broader interest of the nation?

Honestly, I was disgusted. But not with Washington as much as with myself. I mean, if a jackoff like him can end up the most powerful man in congress just by spending other people’s money and telling obviously transparent lies, then I’m convinced that I’ve gotten into the wrong business. If Harry Ried is the standard, give me two decades in congress and people will be praying to statues of me in Temples across the country.

And that view of how low the bar is set for those in government is only confirmed by our community organizer in chief. After two years in the most powerful position in the world, I think we can definitively say that the man can’t do anything – ANYTHING, except read from a teleprompter. His policies are failing on literally every single front, and he’s made the lives of all Americans measurably worse in virtually every way. He’s spent his whole life coasting through academia and local politics, surviving on white guilt and affirmative action. It’s a miracle he can dress himself. In fact, his lack of merit is so obvious that another friend of mine commented the other day that for all it has obviously helped Obama, he wished that he had been born black too. Just look at how easy that would have made life.

If you’re the kind of person that can get past the man, and judge these dimwit politicians not by their manner but by their deeds, it only makes them look worse. If you want results, Democrat politics is NOT the place to look. Every policy, every initiative, every reaction, and every incentive they have ever enacted, has made life worse for most Americans not better. These useless, flatulent, self congratulatory hacks have all spent decades doing nothing but peeing in America’s soup bowl, calling it white wine, and swearing that it will tastes ‘different this time’.

And what’s absolutely worst of all, is that they are so enraptured with their own self importance, that even staring fiscal oblivion in the eye, they still can’t bring themselves to put their vanity aside and act in the best interests of the people elected them. Their worldview is so universally wrong, and so completely distorted, that ‘You’re all going to have to learn to live with it.’ has become official Whitehouse policy. They pretend that 1% off the top of their comically inflated budget is ‘extreme’ and that old people will eat cat food, babies will burst into flames, and that puppies will be kicked into volcanoes if they are forced to surrender even an iota of power.

If I wasn’t so sick already – this would have done it for me.

In congressional invertebrate years I’m still a relatively young man. (Anyone with a 4 or less at the beginning of his age is) So it might not be too late for me. I joked in an email to some friends by asking them if they wanted to contribute to my congressional campaign fund. I mean if these idiot losers can do it, how hard can it be? Of the four guys I sent it to, three offered to send money and one offered to run my campaign. That alone should tell how truly desperate America is for a little intelligence in Washington.