That Giant Sucking Sound You Hear...

... is congress and the president sucking the cash and hope out of the American people.

A follow-up to yesterday's post regarding the failure of the so-called super committee to reach any agreement on deficit reduction: David Gergen and I share many of the same thoughts.

Have they gone nuts in Washington?

In a word, Yes.

Last summer, as the debt ceiling debacle ended, our political leaders held out high hope that a "super committee" would meet for 10 weeks this fall and forge a bipartisan agreement that would do far more to bring down the nation's deficits.

Anyone with half a brain - which excludes 'our political leaders' (*snort*) - harbored serious reservations that a committee with such deep ideological divides would reach any sort of consensus.

Republicans complain that federal spending under President Obama has gone up dramatically and cuts should come there before any new taxes.

Democrats say that the rich have increased their wealth much more rapidly than the other 99% of Americans, while their taxes have gone down, so that the first order of business is to raise taxes on them.

But such contentious disagreements have characterized our politics since the dawn of the republic, and in almost all crises of the past, political leaders have worked out compromises. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1790, "In general I think it necessary to give as well as take in a government like ours." George Washington agreed and pushed continually for what he called "a spirit of accommodation."

Unfortunately, the empty suits currently wasting oxygen in the halls of congress don't have anywhere near the integrity, wisdom, and just plain common sense of Washington, Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers. Today's congresscritters are much more concerned with pandering to their base and getting reelected than with solving the serious problems that confront our country.

... this failure of the super committee represents a reckless, irresponsible gamble by our "leaders" in Washington. It's difficult to remember a Congress that has put the nation so much at risk in the service of ideology and to hold onto office. Partisans on both sides are grievously failing the country.

An honest assessment would lay blame on the White House doorstep, too ... (obama) has been exercising the most passive leadership imaginable. Nor have the Republican candidates for president been any more engaged. Why are their campaigns so focused only on 2013 and so detached from a crisis that continues to deepen in D.C. right now?

It is not as if Congress and the White House are working productively together to solve other problems. They have done almost nothing in recent months to create more jobs and to shore up most homeowners. Hope is not a strategy, as we know, but it seems to be ours right now.

Sorry, our noble leaders tell us, we have to focus now on election 2012.

Well, my focus on election 2012 is to throw every Goddamn one of 'em out and start over. Hell, we could just grab 535 people at random and be better served than we are by the current gaggle of mouth-breathing booger-eating morons presently befouling the air in D.C.