To take the edge off my latest rant against GOP debt-ceiling fanaticism — really, this issue gets me angry like nothing in politics since the emergence of Sarah Palin — here’s a post about a different kind of fanatic: video of the Phillie Phanatic getting hit by a foul ball.
Ha! (Hat tip: Jim Kelly. Apologies to Marty West. Well, not really.)
As to the issue of fanaticism, and the underlying issue of economic responsibility:
The Democratic President has produced no plan to deal with the debt (beyond platitudes) and rejected the proposal of his own debt commission. His budget was rejected by a vote of 97-0 in the Senate.
The Democratically controlled Senate has produced no plan to deal with the debt, and no budget for over 800 days.
The Republican controlled Congress has now submitted two different plans to deal with the debt (Ryan and cap, cut and balance) and submitted a budget, after the Democratically controlled House failed to do so for two years.
As you know, because I’ve posted about it repeatedly (and I even linked some of those posts in my latest rant), I agree with you that Obama has failed to lead on the debt. And I also agree that the Senate’s failure to produce a budget is an epic #FAIL, as we say on Twitter.
Further, while I believe the Ryan plan is deeply flawed and CCB is basically a farce, I will give the GOP credit for putting pen to paper and proposing budgets, however wrong-headed (and nakedly political) they might be.
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s the GOP which is using the threat of “semi-default” (in AMLTrojan’s well-chosen words) to hold a gun to the economy’s head, hoping to extract concessions in exchange for the routine “housekeeping” step — the mathematically necessary expedient — of raising the debt ceiling, despite the fact that, and I repeat…