You want Congress to be reasonable about this?

January 10, 2013

To The Eagle:

The Eagle's last editorial gasp for last year was devoted to dressing down conservatives in Congress for fouling up President Obama's grand plan to tax the rich, which inspires the same response that Ronald Reagan made famous in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter: "There you go again...bashing us poor battered and bruised conservatives." Last time it was the "conservative wing" that was not flapping hard enough; this time we're relegated to "conservative fringe," out there with the loonies, anarchists, and the flat earth folks.

Our editor pleads for Congress (read: "conservative obstructionists") to be reasonable, implying capitulation to or compromise with President Obama, who entered this bargaining session raising the ante on taxes, rejecting a long list of compromises and concessions offered by Speaker Boehner, and demanding the imperial privilege of raising the debt limit on his own recognizance.

Our glorious leader has mounted his white charger and is riding forth to do battle with mythical monsters, while the real world sinks into the blood feuds of radical Islamism in the east and the fiscal incompetence of social democracy in the west. He was re-elected with a nifty mandate: free contraception, gay marriage, and punish the rich, while our feeble-minded conservatives are mucking around with nerdy, old-fashioned ideas like entitlement reform and balanced budgets.

Lady Thatcher was right when she remarked that the problem with socialism is you keep running out of other people's money. News flash: we has done run out -- and are borrowing nearly a third of our daily expenses from China.