Guest View: Reds 1, Wounded Warriors 0

The late, great Will Rogers was asked if he ever worried about running out of hilarious material. The rope-twirling cowboy and son of a Cherokee tribal judge drawled, “Not as long as Congress is in session!”
Congress’s approval rating still helicopters just above Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s. But who says it’s the Do Nothing Congress?
Because the Tea Party sophomore-dominated House of Representatives is back from its summer “recess,” but it’s still playing games. The ”Pay China First Act” it passed before the recess would require that, if the “T.P.” succeeds in shutting America’s government down by next week, the first bankruptcy creditors we pay would be, for example, our neo-Communist Chinese (and ex-KGB-colonel-led Russian) bankers.
Yes. The same bureaucrat-bankers who ponied up yuan and rubles for our $5 trillion (by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stieglitz’s latest long-term estimate) Middle Eastern “mission creeps” and wild goose chases. So, ironically, our heroic veteran wounded women and men would wait in line on outdated-technology legs, with their outdated-technology hands out, behind governments whose People’s Revolutionary Army and Red Army inflicted directly or indirectly – in Korea and Vietnam – tens of thousands of their wounds.
Would-be Washington Navy Yard shooters might not get treated. Our kids risking their necks to save the latest godforsaken combat zone from itself might not get paid.
That’s the T.P.’s answer to complaints that its August 2011 debt limit Shoot-out @ the No Pay Corral shredded America’s 220-year-old triple-A credit report. And sent our roller-coaster economic recovery into a nose-dive, when nervous employers didn’t hire. Even the T.P.’s latest hostage, not-radical Republican House Speaker John Boehner, admits that another refusal to pay America’s bills will “send our economy into a tailspin.”
Thank goodness the latest “stop the presses on Mama’s Medicare claims” showdown was delayed by a few months, by Obama’s already-fast-shrinking deficit. Because soon, the Holy Land will be too chilly for the Animal House fraternity brothers to celebrate their “job-killing” win – (as Republican Federal Reserve Board Chairman Dr. Ben Bernanke described their last sophomoric victory) – with another special-interest-paid, $20,000-a-head road trip. To reenact their August 2011 “Freshman Congressmen Gone Wild” miracles of converting jeroboams of vino into water and victory-dancing – (so far, only one has confessed to skinny-dipping) – on the hallowed water of the Sea of Galilee.
 (Sure, the FBI report declined to make a federal case out of “misdemeanor indecent exposure.” But now, who says “Democrats have more fun?”)
The T.P.’s excuse this time for not paying its bills is its pretended hatred of the Affordable Care Act, which it’s voted to overturn 40 times, @ a cost of $60 million. Will Rogers might say, “That’s funny.”
Because RomneyCare/ObamaCare – let’s call it “RoMamaCare” – was the “conservative” solution to a crisis: taxpayers paying the “pound of cure” bill for E.R. treatment of uninsured runny noses, while 40,000 Americans died every year for lack of an “ounce of prevention.” Every major national Republican leader in the last 20 years signed on. Until Obama agreed with them.
RoMamaCare was dreamed up in 1989 by the Heritage Institute. The Heritage Institute that bashes even top Republican economists’ estimate that immigration reform would add $3 trillion to the U.S. economy. Because the Institute assumes that minority immigrants and their descendants are genetically mentally inferior.
 (Yes. Really. You can’t make this stuff up.)
A lot of progressives – as Mount Rushmore’s progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt did 100 years ago – would have preferred something like “Medicare for the rest of us.” So that, for example, only Medicare’s 3% of our insurance premiums – instead of the now-illegal 30%, or the Affordable Care Act’s maximum-allowed 20% – would go to overhead, like Gallstate’s huge unearned bonuses and private jets for insurance company bigwigs.
The debt limit was passed to assure taxpayers that Congress would keep a lid on World War I spending. (Grandma vouched that Congress kept its word: it did not pay our volunteer “doughboy” grand-dad too much dough.)
Conservative G.O.P. Congressman/Homeland Security Chairman Pete King protests that the debt limit and the federal budget aren’t assault weapons to “hold our economy hostage.” And to threaten America’s economic recovery whenever some small, extremist-fleas-wagging-the-majority-dog “conspiracy of congressmen” doesn’t always get its way. And childishly votes to take its ball and go home.
It’s been rightly observed that T.P. politicians speechify that government can’t work – and as soon as they’re elected, they set out to prove that they’re right. What’s so “conservative” about not paying your bills?