Give Me Liberty or Give Me Debt

Edited/Updated 8/3/11

Bee-Hay-Suse! What a fine mess we’re in here in the USA. Despite the last-minute votes to ensure a non-default on debt, China, our co-owner-in-chief, has decided to downgrade our credit rating anyway.

Oh, what a dry subject, you may declare. Haven’t we focused enough on this issue over the months? Can’t we just go back to our swimming pools or summer camps or backyard BBQ’s and toast to the MOMENT?  And eff all the rest?

Why, of course, let’s toast to the MOMENT, for, as in all philosophies, one knows by now that a MOMENT is all we can be sure of. Anything beyond our current perception/experience of living is mere projection. Be Here Now, right? So then, toast away while our deeper senses send messages that something isn’t right, right now, in our country on so many levels it’s no wonder at all why we tend to nod off in front of the TV News and perk up only when the issue at hand directly effects one’s life or those of other’s we care for.

For the next 5 (five) weeks, the U.S. Congress will be on vacation/holiday. Not “on the clock.” Well, not so fast, peeps. Politicians nary have a true holiday. They must press more flesh in the sake of the handshake to constituents; they must speak at dinners, wear foolish hats at folksy “homespun” events; play cards with the local power-players in luxurious household dens or country club pens.

No rest for the smeary-smarmy world of “You give me this, I’ll give you that.”

Oh, wait! The above is “old school politics.” Now, it is utterly antiquated. The rule of thumb-drum these daze is a revolutionary stance by the The Tea Party and their enablers to completely overthrow the basics of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Okay. I hear it now. Fingers and open growling tea-drinking mouths point to Thomas Jefferson’s much recently quoted-quote of:
 
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.


God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

However, has anyone cared to look further into Jefferson’s beliefs? Here is a thought-provoking piece of sanity to be resurrected in the climate of today’s debates on what is truly going wrong with our country: Sayeth Mr. Jefferson:  The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.


Fascinating, eh? Considering the bill that was passed allows for that “Super Congress” to mess around with SSA, SSI, Medicare, et al, when half of the soon-to-be-no-named/christened nay-sayers have been against anything to do with these “socialistic entitlements” from its inception. This inferior-wrenching “deal” is bound to end up with a stalemate, which has been the Tea Party and extreme Right-non-Forthrights‘s ability to create massive automatic cuts to the named “entitlement” programs under which the Democratic base had been assured would never be on the grand old chopping block of Congress.

Pfffffft goes the entire weasel.

What I believe has happened in Washington DC following the influx of 87 “Tea Party” leaning/backed rep’s to the Congress in last year’s election is the Kamikaze-determination by a muddled, dedicated and fervently frustrated few to wield their eye-rolling-in-the-head-ire into a U.S. honest-to-God revolutionary tea party pyre.

Again, I shiver in the quiver of ramifications whilst these crazies spend the remainder of the summer encased in box-wine or Tiffany-laden egregious handshakes. Think about this sentence.

Now, forget it.

That is precisely what most care to do. Ignore the blatant facts in front of one’s nosey-nose of wanting-to-know-what-the-hell-is-up-with-these-political-aperitif's?

People like me are always lambasted for citing how the U.S. fell into such a deep economic crevasse under the previous administration's drunk daze – which leads us to the Bush Tax Cuts and two wars. (Need I reference them for you? If so, you don’t belong here for politics of the U.S. kind. Suggestion: Do as I do = Google is my friend.)

Let’s just call it as it is: Bush got us into this mess. Period. Check non-partisan charts and numbers. Obama attempted to offset the inevitable deep recession through a lame Stimulus program that barely touched on the surface of the problem and allocated funds to cities and states where the monies were not necessary. Thus, based on the power of individual states to determine where their federal monies would be best served, confusion, in a subtle form, has ensued as another example of government fiscal mismanagement on each and every partisan plate.


I now scurry to place the proper fringe on the top.