The word traitor has been bandied about these last few years and the definition these days seems to be “someone on the left I disagree with”. There is an older, more serious definition:
a person who commits treason by betraying his or her country.
A portion of the Tea Party are religious fanatics determined to bowl over our democracy and replace it with Seven Mountains Dominionism.
We aren’t having “debt ceiling negotiations”. John Boehner has a truly disloyal contingent in his caucus and he lacks the political skill or courage to stop them. Our media, stupid to the point of uselessness with their false balance, will fail to warn the general populace until we’re already past the point of no return.
America is at the edge of an abyss. A portion of the Tea Party is doing everything in their power not to pull us back, but to push us into chaos so they can finish their theocratic coup.
The time has come for leaders on both sides of the aisle to take this dangerous, disloyal minority firmly in hand. They have to be called what they are, concerns over offending those who are religious not withstanding, and then they need to be ridiculed, marginalized, and driven from the public policy sphere.
I can not be pointed enough about this:
A failure to diagnose, publicly discuss, and deal forcefully with the root cause of this largely fake “crisis” is the beginning of the end of the United States of America.
I’ve long thought that our condition of the last few years mirrors that of the former Soviet Union in 1989 and 1990. We’ve exhausted ourselves in Afghanistan to no purpose, just as they did. They faced a peak in domestic oil production, we face a peak in global production concurrent with the potential for a disastrous decline in the credibility of the dollar as the medium of settlement in oil markets. Those two energy issues are very different on the surface, but underneath the result is the same – no society survives the destruction of the resource base on which it was built.
Our empire is old, 245 years, with just one discontinuity and that is a century and a half in the past. Empires seldom hit the 300 year mark, so our country is like an 85 year old human – on that medical dividing line between elderly and “very old”. We don’t have any choice but to reinvent ourselves, which is what started with our reform movement in 2006 and 2008, but it got hijacked by this fanatic minority and a rotten, complicit media in 2010.
Do you want America to look like the Soviet Union did post collapse? Three years ago I read and reviewed Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse. Dmitry went back and forth to Russia right before and during the collapse. He compares the fate of the Soviet Union with America’s current condition and anyone who reads this book will be chilled to the bone – the parallels are simply unavoidable when presented in half a dozen neatly organized chapters.
I don’t have good answers for environment except that we need to do sensible things about energy. As for our economy that’ll come along as best it can if we turn and face climate change and peak oil like the deadly perils they are. We can make our way in the world with dignity and some measure of safety. But …
None of that potential future will come to pass if we do not put aside superstition in favor of science, and we MUST deal forcefully with corruption and return to the rule of the law.
This is it, people. If we don’t get this right it’s bigger than the United States. Our major strategic ally in the Pacific, Japan, just took a quarter trillion dollar hit from the tsunami and the cost of Fukushima can’t be calculated because the damage is ongoing. They are the second largest holder of our debt, nearly a trillion dollars. The triple hit of tsunami, ongoing nuclear disaster, and the sudden devaluation of a large asset they hold could trigger … unwanted events.
And that’s just one of the nightmare scenarios that comes from the Tea Party’s attempted theocratic coup. What will mainland China, our largest debt holder, do if we try to short change them?
We do need to pay down our debt and we can accomplish almost all of that by simply letting the foolish Bush era tax cuts expire. The course the Tea Party drags us towards is a miserable failure for everyone … except their little fringe who want to visit their violent paranoid fantasies on the rest of us.
Mr. Speaker, MAKE IT STOP. Senate Majority Leader Reid, MAKE IT STOP. Mr. President, if they can’t do it, you must MAKE IT STOP.
Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon House office buildings(left to right) as seen from Tortilla Coast. Looks innocent enough from a few hundred yards away, eh?