OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The whole problem with the teleprompter is it can’t come up with a plan. It doesn’t have any of its own ideas. Truth is, it doesn’t come up with anything at all that you don’t type into it.
This is why President Obama — for all of his talk lately about leadership and tough decisions — is pretty much the only person in all of Washington who hasn’t come up with a plan for dealing with the looming debt crisis.
And this is why, of course, leaders in Congress finally gave up on the planless president and decided to work things out together. You know you are a problem when Democrats and Republicans in Congress can work better with each other than they can with you.
And you know you are in deep political trouble when it is Congress that is getting all the work while you aren’t doing anything other than burning a hole in the ozone layer constantly lecturing everybody about how we are on the verge of “Armageddon.”
Or, as any default will forever be remembered, “Obamageddon.”
And the lecture series continued this week with a strange sermon in which Mr. Obama explained to the American people what it is that upsets the American people. (He is not big on plans for fixing things, but he really likes to tell people what they need.)
“Do you know what people are fed up with most of all?” Mr. Obama inquired woodenly of the very American people about whom he was talking. Of course, he did not wait for the American people to respond, this being a lecture and all.
“They’re fed up with a town where ’compromise’ has become a dirty word,” he explained to the fed-up American people.
Which calls into question whether Mr. Obama was too busy reading his teleprompter to pay any attention whatsoever to the last election. Or his own election, for that matter.
In neither election did voters say, “I want politicians in Washington to compromise more.”
Goodness, if politicians in this town compromised any more than they already do, none of them would still be married, the Potomac River would turn green with the last of your money, and lobbyists would actually start outnumbering city rats around here. The common pretzel would not be able to keep up.
Endless compromise and accommodation is precisely how these people have gotten us into this fine mess in the first place.
Dispute over whose political boondoggle to spend millions on? Let’s spend it on everybody’s!
Welfare is un-American and unpopular? Well, let’s give it to both lazy people and big, fat corporations!
Out of money? Well, just print some more!
This town oozes with so much compromise it would drown an honest whale. It is filled with Olympic compromisers. No one here, it seems, is uncompromised.
No, what people are fed up with about Washington is the lack of common sense and basic principle.
You run out of money? You stop spending. And you figure out some way so you don’t ever come this way again.
• Charles Hurt’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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