The Fiscal Rift

A Geologic Rift

Politics in the US is theater of the absurd. It's remarkably absurd theater particularly to pragmatic problem-solvers.

Goodbye to Yankee Ingenuity. Hello to Dixie Dogmatism

Many of the solutions to the problems we face are so blasted simple.

The Fiscal Cliff is the current sideshow featuring a spray-tanned Speaker and his unruly band of tea-bagging nitwits. The Speaker's theme is posturing over pragmatism.

The Republican majority in the US House is a profoundly inept body of ideologues.

The solutions to many of the nation's challenges seem so clear, so obvious, and so cut and dried, yet nothing gets done. NOTHING gets done. The hate-filled ideologues who dominate the Republican party have proven incapable of negotiating.

Informed, thoughtful people are compelled to discount much of what today's Republicans say because:

• it's not well-reasoned (e.g., "the government doesn't create jobs"), 
• it eschews analytic tools like basic arithmetic (e.g., goofball economic plans), or 
• it's incoherent, hate-filled gibberish (e.g., "legitimate rape"). 

Prepend the phrase "Republicans claim" to any sentence and it sparks an steep asymptote toward scant credibility.

Many pine for the moderate Republicans of old. Moderates like Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. were capable of critical thinking. And more importantly, they were capable of cutting a deal. Today's Republican party desperately needs an infusion of moderates capable of reasoned thinking and negotiation.

If the Republican party could somehow marginalize the intransigent right-wing ideologues, it wouldn't be so blasted difficult for Congress to agree on the most obvious groundwork for any negotiation -- the facts.

The Fiscal Cliff is really a Fiscal Rift - a rift between right wing ideologues and moderates.