I don’t care what side of the political aisle you’re on, the fact that we have two houses of the people elected passing (i.e., the House) or refusing to debate (i.e., the Senate) legislation supposedly carved from the “best and the brightest” without any inclination to debate it in public before the people makes me both disgusted and angry with Washington beyond words. Where is the people’s interest? Where is the accountability? I don’t care about assessing blame, and I certainly don’t care about who so-called “wins” and who so-called “loses”.

This country has a spending problem, and the only solution Washington should be discussing is how much to cut, when, and how to stop us from ever getting in this position again.

It doesn’t scare me that the Republicans are falling all over themselves and negotiating with themselves while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Barack Obama stand by without any real plan of ther own. This is what scares me, and it ought to scare the living daylights out of everyone. (Hat tip: NRO’s Corner blog)

I leave it to the esteemed Victor David Hanson to tell it like it is:

The agenda of the poorer and lower-middle classes is championed mostly by an affluent elite located on the two coasts, who find power and influence in representing “the people,” and are themselves either affluent enough, or enjoy enough top government salaries and subsidies, to be largely exempt from any hardship that would result from their own advocacy of much higher taxes and larger government expenditures.

Lost entirely in all these disputes over taxes, relative affluence, and government entitlements is any serious examination of whether federal payouts themselves consistently alleviate poverty or accomplish what they are intended for, or whether, in the age of high-technology, dirt-cheap imported manufactured goods and huge government subsidies, the notion of being poor itself should be redefined. The point is not whether the hundreds of billions invested in, say, a Head Start actually improved school performance, but, implicitly, whether thousands of constituents were employed in its administration, and, explicitly, whether its advocates felt a sense of transcendent caring in such public magnanimity (often not so easily evidenced by the fact of where they otherwise live or send their children to school).

Finally, if you add all of candidate and president Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric up (e.g., “redistributive change,” “spread the wealth,” at some point “made enough money,” hundreds of thousands of dollars in unneeded income, fat-cat bankers, etc.), collate it with the reversal of the Chrysler creditors, the NLRB’s attempted shutdown of the Boeing plant, the government takeovers, the gorge-the-beast deficits, the constant harangue to increase taxes, the creation of a new $200,000 annual-income Mason-Dixon line, and so on, you can sense how insidiously we have entered a new era of class warfare. Quite simply, Barack Obama will be remembered not so much for being the nation’s first African-American president, or even the man who ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, or even for his Obamacare, but as the president who grew government the largest, ran up the largest deficits during any presidential tenure, and laid out most candidly and confidently the argument of why the United States is an intrinsically unfair society and how that must be remedied by government.

It’s pathetic. It’s not just an abdication of leadership on all accounts, but the fact that most of the American people are too stupid to even know just how bad things are, and just how close to a financial Armageddon we are.

Because it elected the incompetent clowns that hold the leadership in the House, the Senate, and most importantly, the White House, this country deserves whatever it gets. Now THAT’s what I call hope and change.