Post election depression

I'm tired of the election. I mean, come on! It's been over for nearly a month! 

I sat down at my computer tonight to hammer out a new article. I suppose this is it...but it isn't what I expected it to be.

I scanned today's news to see if anything inspired me. There was something about yet another Republican budget proposal, yet another way we can supposedly avoid the dreaded "fiscal cliff," another proposal that was just a retread of Mitt Romney's tax plan and budget, as if the damned election didn't happen, as if we hadn't just had a national referendum of precisely these issues and the Republicans hadn't lost.

Which they did, by the way.

I spent an hour or so on Google looking up relevant articles. I roughed out the article itself. I sat and thought for a while about what I was going to write. Then I sat down to watch some TV news to get a handle on what was being said on both sides.

And I decided that anything I had to say had already been said by everyone on the left, and no one had anything to say on the right that made enough sense to bother refuting it. In short, adding my voice would be pointless.

Well, never let it be said that I didn't approach something pointless and put too fine a point on it.

I'd give you my point in a nutshell, but I just did that; we had an election, an election in which these very points were fought over ad nauseam, and Mitt Romney lost. To go a bit further, there was also a Congressional election in which the Republicans lost big and gained little. Most of the Senate seats that were "up for grabs" went Democratic. The Republicans held onto the House, true, but they lost ground there as well.

But after that big Democratic smack-down, the Republicans are trying to spin a monumental loss into a partial victory. In his letter to the President today, in which he outlined yet another tired "Romneynomics" retread, Speaker John Boehner said:

"After a status quo election in which both you and the Republican majority in the House were re-elected, the American people expect both parties to come together on a fair middle ground and address the nation's most pressing challenges."

Oh, come on, John! We the people have been after that for four freakin' years now, and you and your party have thrown up every conceivable roadblock. You have filibustered against more legislation than in any previous Congress, by either party. You have made Congress notorious for doing absolutely nothing, far less than even previous "do nothing" legislatures. And now you want to "come together on a fair middle ground?" Now?

Your losses in this past election were monumental. Your party tried to take control of the Senate, and not only failed but lost seats. Your party went into the election with a very comfortable majority in the House, and it's true you held on to a majority, but a smaller majority than you had. You lost seats. Some of the seats that you lost were in districts where the Republican candidate should have expected an easy win, but didn't get one. Over all, this last election for Congress went horribly bad for you. But now you want us to believe that this was a "status quo election?" Are you freakin' serious?

(If you hadn't blocked nearly every piece of legislation that came before you in the Senate, maybe you could make that "fair middle ground" line without having it sound like a bad joke. But you did; you blocked, delayed, and vetoed your way through the last four years. Likewise, if you hadn't lost House seats, maybe you could claim a partial victory there. But you did lose House seats.)

The election is a month over and you should be able to stop trying to convince yourselves of a fantasy and get back to work. You show no sign of actually wanting to do that. You should be able to come up with proposals that are something more than the plans and policies that America has already rejected. Again, there's no sign of any effort on your part to make something happen. Not even to help something happen. I'd even go so far as to say that you don't behave as if you want anything to happen at all.

Are you waiting for us all to go "over the cliff" so that you can then claim that it isn't your fault? If so, what are you going to do if the Left is correct that it really isn't a cliff at all, but more like a slope? In other words, what if the disaster you're driving us towards, with dire warnings about going over the precipice, turns out to be no disaster at all and all your warnings prove to be just so much hot air?

Like I said, this ground has been covered and re-covered, but I felt like venting. So I vented.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

Speaker Boehner's letter to the President (PDF from the Speaker of the House's web site)

Boehner Sends Cliff Counter, But Revenue Too Light for White House (NationalJournal)

Boehner's Offer For Bipartisan Compromise On Taxes Nearly Identical To Romney Plan (ThinkProgress)