Thursday, July 14, 2011

How I’d Explain the Debt Ceiling Crisis

If I were John Boehner, Speaker of the House:

“As you know, the Republican Leadership has been trying desperately since we were elected to the majority in the House of Representatives, to bring sound financial policy to our government.

But now, the President, the pilot of this great big corporate jet that we’re all riding in as a nation, has come back from his lofty perch in the nose of the plane to inform us that we’re running out of fuel, and we’re going down. Instead of telling us he’s going to throttle back, save the fuel we have left, and look for some soft turf for an emergency landing - he wants to know what WE’RE going to do about it. Turns out, he didn’t file a flight plan. He didn’t calculate how much fuel we’d need for our trip. And, he dumped a most of our fuel while we were in flight. Makes us wonder what he was thinking. Naturally, we make our recommendations - come down to earth, throttle back, measure your resources.

But instead, he demands to fill our fuel tanks with blood from the biggest and strongest of the passengers, the very one’s who’ll help us evacuate if we come down hard. Even if it would work, there’s not enough blood in all of them to make much difference. It would just make it worse for all of us. Clearly, it’s in our own best interests to resist that idea.

Since we have only a majority in the House it’s easy to accuse us of just blocking progress. But the polls show that most of you understand that what we’re blocking is just more of the same “tax and spend” that got us into this mess in the first place. On the other hand, what we’re trying to provide is leadership that you are not seeing from the President and the Democrat-controlled Senate. I deeply regret having to say those words because we Americans have a strong tradition of looking to the holder of the nation’s highest office with a respect that ordinarily would cause one to forebear such direct criticism. We have reached a point with his conduct, however, where such silence concerning it becomes tantamount to a lie.

For example, unlike the presidents before him, this President has failed to produce a budget for the operation of his government. The failure to lead this country financially is dangerous and irresponsible, and the condition we find ourselves in today is all the proof you need. Our national security is impacted by our financial stability.

But to threaten to not pay our military, or to criticise us when we try to step in and attempt fill the leadership vacuum makes us suspicious of the president’s abilities and intentions. We ask, “If he could lead, wouldn’t we be seeing it?” If he could do something good for the nation, wouldn’t he?

Here are four facts that are not in dispute:

-In just two years, this President has driven our nation deeper into debt than all the presidents before him combined.

-This President has failed to produce a budget for the operation of government.

-This President has given away the nations wealth on the promise of rapid reductions in unemployment.

-The President has failed to put before the American people any concrete plan, meaning even a single sentence in written form, as a proposal for solving the debt crisis.

This financial crisis is of his making. These four facts cast doubt on his ability and sincerity and may explain why he has been unable to make anything positive happen.

Of course, I fully expect a shallow response to what I’ve just said. There will be those standing in the midst of the disaster crying, “how dare we speak ill of the President.” We’ll be upbraided by the President’s minions and the media sycophants for blaming him instead of addressing the problem. You’ll pardon us if we ignore that, if we refuse to engage in those diversions and instead insist that you pundits get serious and do your jobs.

You see, the facts are not in dispute. It IS the President’s problem. Now, we must try to solve it without his help and with our best ideas and intentions. We can’t all be the pilot, so we’ll have to do it somehow from the back of the plane, with the people’s help.”