No Vaseline on Capitol Hill

There’s a scene in the movie EuroTrip where a man unwittingly gets stuck in a sexual contraption that resembles a torture device from Star Wars and he can’t pronounce the safe word to escape. I sympathize every time I turn on CNN and watch debt ceiling analysis. In this case, the safe word is probably in Mandarin.

Raising the debt ceiling has been as natural as breathing for our government but suddenly the deficit has become “unsustainable”. The same deficit that went unhindered while being run up by the white guy who almost got assassinated by both a pretzel and a shoe is now an issue after the black guy with an African name took it on. I guess we can’t even escape a bad credit rating if it isn’t ours.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you probably missed one very important point. Our country is designed to run on a deficit. The gold standard was a long time ago. We print money backed by the idea that our word is good when it comes to paying back other countries.

So far so good.

Our deficit has employed thousands over seas bombing dark people to kingdom come. It’s also created a number of public sector jobs in things like infrastructure and education while corporations, or “job creators” as John Boenher would call them,  have sat on $1.9 trillion in surplus.

We keep hearing the word “compromise” because Republicans refuse to raise taxes for these “job creators”. What a ridiculous idea. How can you raise taxes on people that don’t pay them in the first place? (I see you GE).

Our “compromise” is either make cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security while ending tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent or just make cuts to those programs period.

Considering those tax cuts contributed largely to the deficit, the choice might as well be “bend over” or “bend over and touch your toes.”

Literally, there’s something to piss off everybody. Seniors, many of who are Republicans, love Medicare. Poor people depend on Medicaid. To top it off, Social Security is paid for through 2036.

Who knows though, maybe cutting these “unsustainable entitlements” to medicine is a good idea. After all, no business withstands massive unemployment quite like drug dealing. Even homeless people can find a way to get drugs. If more of us buy drugs from people that don’t pay taxes then we’d be fostering a great environment for “job creators”.

Having Social Security in the debate is an interesting touch. It’s paid for through 2036 but somehow it’s worth defaulting in 2012 over. That’s kind of like starting a war on terror to get a guy in Afghanistan and then invading Iraq.

Oh wait. That happened.

Remember the last big compromise over extending the Bush tax cuts, or as I like to call it, the Kunta Kinte hostage situation. Obama caved and extended the tax breaks for the richest two percent of Americans, even though it ran up our debt. The cherry on the sundae was that Republicans screamed they wouldn’t raise taxes under any circumstance but the deal actually raised them for the lowest wage earners. That’s like a kidnapper getting his money, giving the hostage back, but first chopping his feet off because he didn’t like the negotiator’s tone.

Where’s the media in all this? You know, the fourth estate. The watchdog that’s supposed to keep an eye on authority.

It’s busy begging for compromise as if we’re kindergarteners arguing over crayons. I hear the wealthiest two percent all the time but the poor people who are going to suffer cuts they can’t afford are pretty much invisible.

We live in a democracy but you’d never know it. We get the choice of “bend over” or ” bend over and touch your toes” while cable news literally whispers sweet nothings in our ears.