There’s just a few more hours!

The great witching hour approaches and in Middle Earth, in Mordor our great hero, America, is being held over a vat filled to the brim with boiling, deadly chemicals. Who can save us?
by Charlie Leck

One of the voices of compromise in the U.S. Senate is John McCain (Arizona). Amazingly, he’s been telling young conservatives, new to the Senate, that they are in fantasyland if they really believe they can pass a balance budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Here’s a video from the Senate floor in which McCain lets them know they are “deceiving America into believing such a thing can pass the Senate.”

“You’re in fantasyland, and you’re doing your constituents a disservice by perpetuating the falsehood that such a thing can ever happen.”

Whoever thought that I would hail McCain as a great voice of reason, sanity and compromise? Huh?

Senator McCain pointed his new, conservative colleagues to a July 27 editorial in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that tears into Republican ultra-conservative as out of touch with reality.

“The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.”

That’s the fantasyland that John McCain is talking about; however, it is not a fantasy to these crazy and passionate Republicans. People like the craziest of them all, Michele Bachmann, have got these rookies believing such things are possible. They don’t get it that they will be weakening the American economy beyond belief and a very costly government economic program will then be necessary to retrieve the country from despair.

Today’s America has some of the lowest taxes on earth among the developed nations of the world. Many people enjoy staggering wealth because of the government and the protections and encouragement it gives the private sector. Bachmann and her fantasizing followers would bring that all down. In fact, America’s wealthiest citizens are willing to accept a reasonable tax increase on their income if it will enable the American economy to get even stronger.

Sure, we spend too much. We spend too much on some of the craziest programs the mind could devise and we can make cuts to expenditures (including military spending), but we have to be reasonable and we can’t leave older citizens, the poor, and children in need of top-notch educations in the lurch.

“There’s just a few more hours! That’s all the time we’ve got – a few more hours before it’s twelve o’clock.”

Let’s hope John McCain and other reasonable voices in the Senate and House can convince the radical members of the Tea Party that this is not a video game we’re playing here. This is real! It’s for all the marbles.

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