Originally posted as a note on my Facebook page.
The long & short of the ongoing "fiscal crisis" is that it is, at this point, an artificially manufactured crisis that is causing serious real-world issues. The delusion & deceptive "national conversation" that the traditional media insists on promoting isn't helping.
Case in point: a piece from the Washington Post1 makes the following statement:
Ideally, the budget environment for weather and climate research wouldn’t be an either/or situation. State of the art computing resources should be available to both areas.But during a time when our nation faces a fiscal crisis and the government is having to make tough choices about what the highest priorities are - leadership within NOAA and Congress should take a close look at the balance of resources...
There are a couple of things wrong with that. The first one that leaps out and grabs my face like one of the creatures from Alien is "during a time when our nation faces a fiscal crisis" - really? Simply letting the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich expire would substantially resolve that, but the fiscally feral Republican, Tea Party & Libertarian extremists keep pushing for more tax breaks for the wealthy...hoping, apparently, that the rest of the nation is either too pre-occupied or distracted to notice just how much damage that those tax cuts have done, or who has benefited.
And then another major nit: "leadership" - within Congress? - "should take a close look at the balance of resources" ... yeah, right. Like the GOP-ish members of Congress aren't already trying to undermine any attempts to clean up their previous, repeatedly gouging stabs at fiscal 'responsibility.' That's like giving the Anthony Perkins character at the start of Hitchcock's classic Psycho another knife in exchange for a kiss & a promise not to use it again the same way on the new chick showering in the guest room right down hall...and oh, by the way, here's the key and an extra towel for the mess.
Yes, our economy is in shambles. And the GOP not only holds primary responsibility for putting it into that condition in the first place - it also holds primary responsibility for keeping it that way in an effort to blame the current administration for the catastrophic mess they created before it even took office.
News organizations like WaPo aren't helping the matter when articles like the above discuss what should be non-issues that have resulted from artificially, intentionally created & maintained crises.
As long as articles like that spend time trying to reasonably discuss how to deal with unreasonable, falsely presented artificial issues, we as a nation aren't going to move toward any real solutions any time soon. And the "adjustments" we make to adapt to the artificial conditions may do more damage to our nation and her people than any foreign terrorist organization could ever dream of.
Today's GOP, Tea Party & Libertarians are the true danger - extremists, wrapped in a flag & carrying their (unread) Bibles, arming for war against citizens and other nations alike in order to protect their vested moneyed interests. They are the epitome of subversion: domestic terrorists, using a combination of fiscal, social & stochastic terrorism to further their own self-serving agenda at the expense of the rest of the nation, and they're supported in part by the gullible, the fearful, the uninformed and the hate-filled.
And the other part - the moneyed interested themselves - are funding the whole thing. Lock, stock & barrel.
At this point, our nation needs a collective reality check. And a socio-political enema that also cleanses the colon of the traditional media.
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Footnote
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(1) Is climate change research holding back advances in weather forecasting? By Jason Samenow, Posted at 11:12 AM ET, 05/16/2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...