The current battle to the death over the nation’s debt limit between the Tea Party-run Congress and the White House reminds me of Live Free or Die Hard, one of Bruce Willis’ later editions in his “Die Hard” movie franchise.
In that film, the hero confronted a villain — a vengeful national security consultant — whose purpose was to sabotage the entire infrastructure of the Eastern Seaboard with the ultimate goal of downloading and stealing all of the United State’s personal and financial records from top secret servers down in the bowels of a government facility somewhere in Maryland.
This current crisis makes me suspect that the Die Hard producers used Ted Cruz and Eric Cantor as script consultants for that film.
In every “Die Hard” movie, we have come to expect ultra-violent thrills, big crashes and near-death experiences that confront our hero, complete with ruthless villains and their evil accomplices willing to wreck the local infrastructure and the world. And so it seems now in Washington. As in Hollywood, so on your nightly news channel. We are now on a Plutonian roller coaster ride, with hills and valleys made more steep by Uranus. A period of absolutes. High stakes and do or die. Or maybe not.