Sometimes you just have to sit back and admire the ridiculousness of it all.
In the immortal words of John McEnroe, “You can't be serious!”
Sadly, yes, they are serious.
Let's clear off the workbench:
IMAGINE A SPOUSE — male, female, whatever — who sees no relation between what gets spent every month and the credit card bills that arrive in the mail.
Hard to believe, but that's the kind of dysfunctional marriage we have in Washington.
The Republicans, no sterling examples of frugality themselves, nonetheless figure that with $31 trillion in accumulated debt (maybe as high as $33 trillion) it might be time to cut spending. But there's no way — no way — their Democrat “colleagues” (never trust anyone who calls co-workers colleagues or anyone who calls wild spending “investing”) are about to stand for anything short of spending trillions more.
Anything less than much more would be, well, racist. (Obviously.)
One of the best knee-slappers of all time is when Democrats say they are worried sick about “the full faith and credit of the United States government,” while they simultaneously claim any talk of spending less is a “non-starter,” “ridiculous” and “being held for ransom.”
No, they demand a “clean bill” raising the debt limit, and no spending cuts.
You couldn't stay married to a spouse like that, and the day will come — sparked no doubt by something awful — that we reach the same conclusion about Washington's spendthrift ways.
What doesn't work at home shouldn't work in Washington either, and heaping huge, ruinous debt on our grandkids is selfish and evil.
CASE IN POINT: Transportation Secretary Pothole Pete wants to spend $20 million on new female crash test dummies. We're hugely in debt, but there's always plenty of money around for new priorities like female crash test dummies.
Easy borrowed, easy go.
A CLOSE RUNNER UP for the best knee-slapper of all time is when, near the end of any election campaign, Democrats say that Republicans (many of whom are on Social Security, myself included) want to end Social Security.
(Remember the ad with a grandma in a wheelchair being shoved off a cliff by a guy who looked a lot like Paul Ryan?)
Biden said as much last year, and I laughed because I knew it was coming.
This time, however, even our own guy, Donald J. Trump, is claiming in campaign ads that Ron DeSantis wants to kill Social Security. In this, Trump is just as big a liar as Biden.
(Anyone who wants to fix Social Security and avoid mandatory cuts of 23% as soon as 2034 is an easy target for the senior-scaring charlatans, and we shouldn't fall for it from either side.)
I'll vote for Trump if he's our nominee, given the historic mess pathetic and hapless Biden has created.
But you have to wonder when the guy who said Ted Cruz's father was involved in the Kennedy assassination, that said world-famous surgeon Ben Carson was a teenage gang-banger and now says ex-Navy SEAL DeSantis would be working in a pizza parlor if it weren't for his help — well, you just have to wonder when Trump will finally run into someone who says, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
I'll vote for the results Trump gets, but I pray that someday soon he will grow up. He's like the uncle who gets carried away during the family Thanksgiving touch football game and knocks out a nephew's front teeth.
HONORABLE MENTION knee-slapper of all time to that journalist Matt Taibbi – an unrepentant liberal who worked for decades at hipster Rolling Stone Magazine – who’s accused of being a Republican tool (and threatened with jail) for writing about the shameless Twitter collusion with the government.
Back to McEnroe: “You can't be serious!”
LASTLY, I see that new policies are in the works so that waiters and waitresses (waitpersons?) will pay their fair share of taxes on the tips they receive.
Surely, given the endless promises President Biden made during prior campaigns, only waitpersons making more than $400,000 a year will pay more, right?
He wouldn't lie to us, would he?
