PrintMarch 12, 2011
Tepid Tea
It is enough to make a grown man weep to see how tepid the House Republicans are under Speaker John Boehner. It isn't just that their pathetic excuse for federal budget cuts betrays the 2010 electoral mandate of the American people, which it does. It is that their tepid response to the massively destructive federal budget signals to the American people that the Republican Party still cannot be trusted with the reins of government.
We live in a time of crisis, and the people are seeking substantive solutions to life-threatening problems. That means they want the politicians to stop their inane chatter about "getting along" and "compromising" with one another, while the nation continues going to Hell in a hand basket. The faux media limelight in which Washington politicians bathe from sunup to sundown casts long shadows, to be sure, but those shadows are not real. They are but suggestions of reality. A hard reality besets the American people, while our politicians are beguiled by shadows.
If John Boehner's tears are shed only for his personal climb out of poverty into power, then he should retire from public service and go sit on his laurels somewhere. The American people are outraged at what the "elites" are doing to this country, and if John Boehner and his coterie of Republican followers haven't got the stomach to stand up to them, then they should get out of the way of people who do. Michelle Bachmann and Paul Ryan have set the gold standard of uncompromising honesty in politics today. They know that any budget deal that allows a single dollar of taxpayer money to fund a single program or agency involved in ObamaCare is a dollar that is being used to subvert our Constitutional Republic.
The Tea Party movement should have been a wake-up call to John Boehner and the "go-along-to-get-along" Republican political class. It is time to get some Republicans into office who are less concerned with how well the "elites" think of them than they are about how well they do for the American people. If John Boehner can't make the cut, then the American people will really give him something to cry about in the 2012 Republican primaries.
