WaPo Headline: 'Democrats threaten to go over 'fiscal cliff' if GOP fails to raise taxes'

The Democrats want a class warfare, soak-the-rich campaign talking point so badly that they are openly willing to risk plunging the United States into another recession:

Democrats are making increasingly explicit threats about their willingness to let nearly $600 billion worth of tax hikes and spending cuts take effect in January unless Republicans drop their opposition to higher taxes for the nation’s wealthiest households.

Emboldened by signs that GOP resistance to new taxes may be weakening, senior Democrats say they are prepared to weather a fiscal event that could plunge the nation back into recession if the new year arrives without an acceptable compromise.

Sen. Patty Murray, who once favorably compared late terrorist Osama bin Laden’s foreign policy to our own, is leading the Democrats’ charge.

This is big, and it is outrageous: The fundamental difference between the two major parties is exposed for all to see. The Democrats want to punish job creators with higher taxes and are willing to hold middle class tax rates hostage to get what they want. The Democrats are lurching hard left on a pretty fundamental thing in an election year: the state of the economy. This is Jim Jones, drink-the-Koolaid stuff the Democrats are doing. They are threatening to hurt millions of Americans if the GOP doesn’t agree to raise taxes, taxes which may help bring the weak economy down if they are enacted. But if the GOP agrees to raise them it disappoints and dispirits its own base, and will share the blame for the consequences.

If this election is to be about big ideas instead of minutiae or who is and isn’t a past felon (that would be former cocaine user Barack Obama, by the way), let it be about this. Let it be about which party wants to grow the economy and which party is willing to risk destroying the economy just to have some kind of wedge issue. Let it be about whether we are a capitalist society that rewards work or a collectivist society that denigrates work from the top.

Unfortunately, though, this won’t be a campaign about big ideas. It will be a campaign about capturing the voters in the middle, who are mostly not interested in big ideas. If they were interested in big ideas, they would not be in the middle. Most would already be aligned with one side or the other, and anti-patriots like Patty Murray would have had to get real jobs a long time ago.