Double-dog dare ya

Obama’s warning to Eric Cantor—“don’t call my bluff”—was a misstatement overlooked by everybody I’ve read. Granted, the prez issued the challenge in a moment of anger as he walked out of talks on raising the debt ceiling, but I doubt he meant to suggest he is bluffing. Nor is Cantor, for that matter. It’s clear he’s willing to let the US default on its credit obligations, no matter the economic consequences, and then let the blame fall on the president,despite Mitch McConnell’s warning that default would bring irreparable harm to the Republican “brand.”

So branding is what this is all about.

What Obama meant to say was “I’ll call your bluff and raise you a trillion.” He’s willing to play a deadly game of chicken with Republican fundamentalists because he knows he’s going to win this one.

In any case, Obama is right to hold out against a short-term resolution which would put us back in the middle of this absurd debate two more times before the next election. Once the debt ceiling gets raised and fixed in place until after November 2012, I doubt it will carry any weight as a campaign issue. Most people have no idea what the debt ceiling is anyway, and come November plus one, the issue will still be jobs, jobs, jobs.

Actually, I’ve had a great impulse to write about all of this, but two things have kept my keyboard quiet: one is that everybody else is writing about it to the degree that there’s not much else to read, and I see no compelling reason to endlessly repeat the litany of dire consequences to arrive if we fail to act by the August 2nd deadline. Second, I keep waiting to see what will happen the next day, but the next day is always exactly the same as yesterday, and I haven’t seen an opportune moment to jump in.

Meanwhile, important news stories barely get mentioned, including the arrest of a woman who cut off her husband’s penis and ran it down the garbage disposal: “Catherine Kieu Becker of Garden Grove reportedly prepared dinner for her husband and put a poisonous substance or drug in his food to make him drowsy. While the man was sleeping, Becker allegedly tied him to the bed. When he awakened, Becker cut his penis off with a knife and threw it into the garbage disposal, turning it on as she did so.”

Clearly, Kate learned a lesson from the perfectly named Lorena Bobbit, who after cutting off her husband’s penis, drove off in her car and threw it in a field, where it was somehow magically recovered and surgically reattached. Lorena’s husband John went on to a brief career as a porn star, proving I don’t know what exactly except that modern medicine certainly has come a long way.

The message to men is clear: put the toilet seat down after you pee.

In the end I believe Obama will use his executive authority under section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Suppressing the tea party insurrection and rebellion is what this is really all about, after all.