An Inconvenient Truth

Irwin Bowels and Homer Simpson, Red Barry's twin national debt bagholders, scoff at the epic battle over what, if the national debt were a multi-course buffet dinner, would be what number of parsley flakes to put on one of the appetizer plates:

One can understand the impatience; it's kind of like going to the movies to see the most anticipated film of the year and having to sit through an hour and a half of coming attractions, or like finding a bomb in your basement and then the bomb squad decides to stop for lunch and then a rub and a tug from the local erotic masseuse.  While Nero is obliviously fiddling, Rome is burning to the f'ing ground.

Ensign Ed says chill out because the big changes - statutory in changing entitlement spending, not budgetary - weren't coming in the FY2011 budget anyway.  And there is this little matter of the Dems still running the Senate and White House to take into account.  But as Ace has pointed out, why not aim high with Rand Paul's half-trillion bucks in cuts so that when the inevitable compromise is struck, it's struck at a higher level than a mere $61 billion will raise?  A 30% cut to the ANNUAL deficit is a better start than 3%, wouldn't you say?

Of course, if Simpson were still in the Senate, and Bowels had ever gotten there, 'tis highly unlikely they'd be scoffing like this.  More likely is that Homer would already be in duck & cover mode, and Bowels would be carrying Dirty Harry's cowboy poetry spittoon contents for him.  But at least they did the job The One wanted to pretend he wanted them to do: address the national debt crisis he created.

Rhetorically, anyway.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, back at the Double-Cross Budget Ranch, Barry & Harry are breaking one record after another:

The federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February at $223 billion, according to preliminary numbers the Congressional Budget Office released Monday morning.

That figure tops last February’s record of $220.9 billion, and marks the 29th straight month the government has run in the red — a modern record. The last time the federal government posted even a monthly surplus was September 2008, just before the financial collapse.

IOW, just before the Democrats pulled the trigger on their financial logic bomb in order to put False Messiah over the top and into the White House.  How....symbolic.

Watch this Cato vid and then go find a corner in which to go fetal.  I know I will.

'NOTHER UPDATE: One other thought: this epic battle is not about the specifics of the numbers - how much to cut, over what period of time, what programs get axed, etc.  This is over which budgetary paradigm is going to ultimately reign supreme: the profligate, economically suicidal status quo, or that of the United States Constitution the founding fathers bequeathed to us.  Between such diametric opposites there is and can be no common ground, no overlap, and frankly, no feasible compromise.  Either limited government is restored, or we spend ourselves to death.

The problem is, Regressivism has an eighty year head start, and that puts unavoidable political constraints on the GOP getting into the fiscal responsibility pool more than one toe at a time.  The BIGGER problem is that Debtaggedon approaching like the mythical dinosaur-killing asteroid.  Which leaves the quandary: do Republicans, er, "go for broke" knowing how short the time is, and risk getting thrown back out of office again by duped, ignorant voters, which would seal America's fate?  Or do they remain without the bounds of the politically possible, and run out of time long before they can haul the country out of fiscal collapse's way?

How'd you like to be John Boehner these days?  'cause this is what he, and we, are up against:

Note: He's not kidding.  He's deadly serious.  He really means all this nonsense.  The Left will have to have this puerile, greedy, wave-the-magic-wand/the-easter-bunny-poops-Watermelon-flavored-Skittles pathology pried from their cold, collectively dead fingers, because there's no way in all the hells they're going gently or quietly or peacefully into that political good night.

The $64 googleplex question is, will any of us still be alive to do the prying?