Amy Davidson at the New Yorker asks why it is "so hard to focus — in a non-dawdling way — on the fiscal cliff? It has an unpleasantness to it that goes beyond the standard tedium of budget debates. We’ve all been inveigled in a distinctly Republican psychodrama that is not even particularly fascinating..."
... Disaster may be at hand, but no one seems invigorated by the suspense. Commentators keep talking about a game of chicken, but it doesn’t feel like anyone pointing stolen cars toward the abyss, with Natalie Wood about to give the signal to start. It’s more like the Republican Party has been inhabited by a group of sullen middle-schoolers throwing pebbles off the ledge, and at each other, while the rest of us have to watch—cheated out of a post-election interlude of not being subjected to too much nonsense. ...New Yorker
Cheated is right! Over and over again -- since that awful Supreme Court decision in 2000 -- we've been cheated. Tomorrow is the end of the world, if you believe the official boob-tube interpretation of the Mayan calender. It reminds me of pulling a bunch of bucks, cash, from my bank account during the final week of the run-up to the final minutes of the 20th century, just in case. You remember, too? It wasn't so much that all hell would break loose but that the boobs would make all hell break loose. So it was better to be prepared.
We may not be cheated out of drama this time. The fiscal cliff is a Republican psychodrama but 12 solid years of horrors caused by those Republicans has more than made up for not having an explosion on December 31, 1999. We are indebted to the Republicans for a real mess. They owe us a huge debt for what they've done. And they still won't shut up and go away.
We don't have Natalie Wood to to give the signal. Instead most Americans, in unison, are ready to push the Republican party in all its manifestations off their invented fiscal cliff and onto the real rocks below.
All together now...