Debt Ceiling Debacle: The Reaction Is The New Story

We're terrorists, we're jihadis, we're suicide bombers, we've got mental disorders, we hate America....all have been applied to the Tea Party by the Left over the past few days, building up to its crescendo today, as the Vice President seems to have also appropriated the terminology, thus letting loose the left-wing dogs of hate.

Victor Davis Hanson sounds like a man who is growing dizzy as he peers into the the abyss from the tops of the cliffs of insanity:

A common charge is that the tea party was terrorist-like in its willingness to bring the fiscal system to a halt to enforce some sort of limits on new debt. I say ‘common’ since the vice president of the United States purportedly put his own brand on that slur. But tea-party efforts to control the spending were belated and reactive; the real nihilism comes from those who apparently wanted no limits on the debt they might run up and had no plan to pay it back.


In one formula, we are borrowing $4 billion a day and have run up nearly $5 trillion in the first three years of this administration. To define questioning a debt of $16 trillion as heartless cutting is unhinged. The country is now in a surreal cycle of borrowing gargantuan amounts of money, and then almost automatically going ballistic should anyone suggest that we trim any of the new borrowing.

That line in red is key, and John Podhoretz follows up on it:

I’m struck by a quality shared by all those who engage in increasingly uncontrolled rhetoric about the role of the members of Congress who opposed a debt-ceiling increase and any deal: They sound impotent.They are hurling violent words at the people they dislike because they cannot believe their own arguments are not winning the day.

And what, pray tell, did the leftist media expect after the huge wave of Republican victory that started back in 2009 with the elections of Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, and evolved into the taking of the House and near-taking of the Senate? Did they really think they would abandon all their principles, all their promises, everything they stood for in order to assist Barack Obama continue unhindered in his radical agenda?

Apparently so:

They ran for election in 2010 promising to do what they could to change the relationship of the body politic to the federal government, to reverse the spending mania in Washington, and to hold true to principles of limited government. They won. They were presented with bills they thought failed the test. They voted against those bills. In what conceivable universe is this entirely appropriate behavior by elected officials trying to fulfill their campaign promises tyrannous, terroristic, jihadist, or anything else? Opposing tax hikes is the act of a jihadist? Wanting larger cuts in government programs is terrorism? Exercising the right to assemble into a loose coalition to oppose such things is dictatorial?

It isn’t, of course. These words are tossed about because the people who speak them are becoming aware of the fact that they have lost the national argument they believed they had won in 2008. They are revealing themselves as losers, sore losers, bad losers. And Joe Nocera, Paul Krugman​, Fareed Zakaria, and others aren’t making arguments. They’re throwing petulant tantrums.

And when the aforementioned losers, as well as their lesser-known blogging contemporaries, throw tantrums, how should we react?

Why, the same way we do when a child throws a tantrum. Ignore them, walk away, go about your adult business, and wait for the baby to tire himself out, and to eventually curl up in a little ball, exhausted, covered with their own spittle and urine...