Democrat Tom Harkin has a sad:
On the Senate floor before 10 a.m. Friday, the senator gave a speech describing how American politics have reached the level at which “a small group of willful men and women who have a certain ideology”—read: the tea party and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas—have been able to take over the congressional budget debate in the last week. “Since they can’t get their way,” Harkin said, “they’re going to create this confusion and discourse and hope that the public will be so mixed up in who is to blame for this, that they’ll blame both sides.”
This isn’t just congressional business as usual, Harkin said. It’s much, much more dire:
It’s dangerous. It’s very dangerous. I believe, Mr. President, we are at one of the most dangerous points in our history right now. Every bit as dangerous as the break-up of the Union before the Civil War.
Well, Harkin has been in the Senate since Reconstruction, so he oughtta know. Seriously, Iowa, can’t you find someone else? I’d ask the same question to the people of Arizona.
To take Harkin seriously, though, if he thinks things are so dangerous, perhaps he should call on the White House to stop calling Republicans “terrorists.” Such language is not conducive to the “new tone” Democrats keep trying to shove down their opponents’ throats. Such language does nothing but create more rage.
He might also call on the Team Obama, which just sat down with the Holocaust-denying, terrorist-supporting Iranian regime, to negotiate with Republicans over domestic policy. Or are Republicans now worse than actual, nuclear-weapon-desiring apocalyptic mullahs jonesing for the end of days?
Harkin won’t do that. His comments are a scam, supporting a scam government pushing scam politics to a new level in American history.
Don’t get me wrong. Politics has always attracted scam artists, and scams have always been a part of politics. We have always had the scam of distraction — bread and circuses in Rome — and scam elections in the USSR and Iraq and every single dictatorship that ever existed have been around a while too.
We’ve always had scammers in American politics for the same reason that we’ve always had thieves who target banks — politics is where the power is, and thus it’s where you can make your scam legal while derailing the scams of your competitors.
But American politics in the Obama age have become little more than a scam writ large. This president and his enablers in Congress perpetuate scams and tell them they’re for our own good. The 2009 stimulus. Obamacare. Their repeated use of tragedy to push gun control. “Comprehensive” immigration reform.
All scams. The stimulus mostly paid off Obama’s allies and cronies while doing nothing for the rest of us other than bury us in more debt. Obamacare was less about health care than about fundamentally changing the citizen’s relationship to the state. Gun control is a perennial Democrat issue because Democrats hold individual rights in disfavor and want a disarmed, helpless populace dependent on them. “Comprehensive” immigration reform is really about creating millions of new Democrat voters at a stroke. They’re all scams.
But the biggest scam these cons have been playing on the American people is the lack of a federal budget. Barack Obama promised to go through the budget line by line and root out every penny of waste. But as president he has only submitted clown budgets that failed to attract a single vote. His allies in Congress have kept America going on continuing resolutions year after year, rendering the entire budgetary process opaque while systematically violating the law. This approach has turned one of the most basic jobs of governance into government by crisis, with a Groundhog Day twist: We keep having this same ridiculous fight over and over again. If Harking wonders why there is no comity in Washington anymore, it’s mainly because Obama’s style of government by crisis, rinse, re-fight, has generated nothing but animosity and mistrust. The entire budget process has been a giant con and a crisis that Obama can turn on and turn off as his political needs dictate. It makes everyone in Washington look like con.
It’s all one giant scam. We’re forced to play our roles in it all, choosing one side and throwing rocks at the other, while a bemused Obama tweaks the government bureaucracy behind the scenes to wage war on various sectors of the US economy and our traditional values and way of life. It’s quite cynical, even evil, the way he scams and manipulates us into one civil war after another, never letting the latest crisis go to waste.
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