Making sense of America’s political world today is like trying to ride a centrifuge. You can’t help but feel dizzy by the spiraling further and faster from logic, Constitutional law and actual common sense, let alone compassion.
Over the last month, in time for the Mercury retrograde, I found myself jumping off the centrifugal ride — turning off the television, switching the car radio from the news to the sports station, turning away from one more headline and walking faster up the street — just to stop the idiocy of one more talking point entering my head. I did it to prevent myself from going just plain fucking mad. At the very least, ceasing contact with the dissonance helped bring down my blood pressure.
With everything in 2011 geared towards 2012 and the general elections, today’s opposition party in Congress is doing everything it can — standing on their heads to defy even their responsibilities of office — to hamstring government and the revitalization of the economy so President Obama can take the blame for government’s dysfunction and our economic collapse.
House Speaker John Boehner handed the negotiations for the federal debt ceiling and the fate of the world’s fiscal stability to the Tea Party’s Congressional Republicans — a group that hates government and loves Medicare but can’t connect that Medicare is a government program. The fate of Social Security, once the third rail in politics and sacrosanct for over 70 years — has been up for discussion. Following Hurricane Irene, Majority Leader Eric Cantor — vying for the title of Chief National Asshole — demanded that FEMA’s shortfall of funds, needed to address hurricane damage on the East Coast, should come from existing funds covering disaster relief for the Midwest.