A SAKI FUELED DRIVE-BY ON CONGRESS

This short piece by the Federalist is interesting but it doesn't go far enough.  It explains the slightly tortured way the President got an open limit on the deficit ceiling from his friends in the Republican Party.

I think for the president to ask for a clean debt ceiling when we have a debt this size of our economy is irresponsible.” What McConnell should have added then is: but there’s nothing we can do about it right now. We have to work on winning more seats, and then we can stop this endless cycle of irresponsible spending.

If you always cave in to the so-called moderates, it looks like you never do anything except compromise your standards for nothing in return. It's always easier to be a little evil but that isn't the goal now, is it? When you repeatedly slither to the far left in search of 'moderate' support from the likes of Arlen Specter, what use are you to the people who thought they elected the opposition? Remember, Specter was a Democrat from 1951 to 1965, then a Republican from 1965 until 2009, when he switched back to the Democratic Party after a quick bit of betrayal and backstabbery.

Specter conspired with Harry Reid to be the 60th vote in the Senate to pass Obamacare. This was one of the "moderate voices" republicans are ordered to pay attention to lest they abandon the party in the name of principle.

This was not a nameless beach that anybody was going to die on. This was a simple matter of urging your party to vote for its principles and the republican leaderships couldn't even risk that. It may sound like I am advocating another government shutdown but that is not the case. I'm simply pointing out that enough of the men and women elected to the Senate as republicans can always be counted on to vote democrat and spend more money than the nation has. Let them vote their principles in an open unforced vote so the people can clearly see what they elected to represent them in Congress.

Cruz wants people to see that it is not enough to vote Republican since all kinds of low-lifes revel shamefully in that guise. You can see the kind of faith and trust the people have in their government and how it is reciprocated by the government when you look at arms and ammunition sales in this country.

When the revolution comes, it's going to be a bloodbath.

Writing this brought back old memories of reading Saki when I was young. There was just a 2 hour interlude while I reread some of my favorites such as The Storyteller. Here is a smidgeon of what Christopher Hitchens wrote about H H Munro in 2008.

Saki surprised all his elite admirers. His reasons for insisting on signing up for the trenches, when he was easily old enough to evade that fate, were almost comically reactionary. Enraged by the antimilitarist left that thought socialism preferable to world war, he argued in effect that even world war was preferable to socialism.

I don't suppose he would have been amused to see entire ways of life swept away by the World War and the ultimate triumph of socialism in the West. One can read many of the stories of H H Munro here.