This Is Not A Democracy

For about a week now, I've been trying to find the time to get in a blog about this whole debt ceiling mess, but it's been tough. I've been juggling my regular job, home business, getting ready to move, and being a dad to a very demanding six-month-old little boy, and I just can't always get around to it, dear readers. And now that this thing we're calling a deal has been reached, I'm trying to at least comment on that, but I'm having a problem of a very different sort: no news sources, columnists, editorialists, bystanders, onlookers, rubberneckers, slack-jawed yokels or anybody of any stripe seem to be in complete agreement about what the deal accomplished, so it comes down to who you trust. And since this is the United States, I don't trust the media to keep me accurately informed (and some sources I automatically assume are outright lying to me).

The only consensus I see is that nobody is really all that happy with the outcome, and almost everybody is angry to some degree at our politicians. Liberals seem to be pissed (and rightly so) that the Democrats once again managed to show a complete lack of backbone, conservatives are saying that they're disgusted that they compromised anything at all (even though they didn't), working class and poor Americans are furious that their government has once again failed to act on their behalf, and this guy right here can't even comprehend how most of this became an issue. That's not to say that I don't understand what happened, but rather that it astonishes me (for some reason) that it was allowed to happen.

Look, kids, raising the debt ceiling has historically been pretty routine for our lawmakers, because most of them prior to this round have at least been competent enough to realize that defaulting would be disastrous, and it's too serious to fuck around with, so they just got it done and that was good enough. This time, however, we have an extremist group to deal with, one that is disproportionately vocal and demanding to how large it actually is, and this group, the Tea Party, is so desperate for anything they can cling to as a political victory that they are willing to leverage anything and make an issue out of anything. And since there isn't anything else right now, they took up this debt ceiling issue, only you can't really come out in opposition to that, because then you look like the fringe lunatic you really are. So what they did was, they basically said they wouldn't go along with it unless the Democrats agreed to cut a bunch of spending and continue letting corporations and the wealthy off the tax hook. Neither of those things has a damn thing to do with avoiding a default, but what Teabaggers lack in rationale, they more than make up for in terrifying levels of understanding of their opposition, and they knew they could count on most Americans to not put two and two together, and they knew that they could count on Democrats to back down when push came to shove. So they went ahead and lumped all this stuff together, knowing full well that nobody would attempt to say, "Hey, wait a minute here, these are separate issues, there is no reason to be dealing with them together." And sure enough, nobody said a word about it. And sure enough, the Democrats were basically forced to back down to the spending cut and tax demands in order to avoid a default.

Our government disgusts me on a near-daily basis anyway, but this is just epic. Its collective ineffectiveness and inability to work in the best interest of the country is staggering. The Republican Party as a whole is selfish, manipulative, and operates almost exclusively in defense of those who have nearly all of the money and power, just so they can collect the scraps handed down to them under the table. The Democratic Party, allegedly the champions of the little guy, who purport to work in the interests of reason, compassion, fairness and social justice, frequently lack the conviction to make good on what they promise to accomplish on behalf of those who most need and deserve the help of a functional government.

This whole ordeal has been fucking pathetic, serving only to exemplify further what is wrong with our government. Never before in our history have our politicians so thoroughly refused to act like they work for the people. This is not a democracy, folks, and continuing to call it one will only serve to someday redefine the term.