Where is the audacity? Where is the hope?

So the debt ceiling "compromise" turned out about like many of us on the left had expected - essentially with all the "balancing" being done with cuts to the budget that affect the poor and middle-class and no new revenues coming into the nation's coffers from the super-rich.  In other words, exactly the sort of thing which knowledgeable economists have been warning against for months now.

And now we'll see how it all plays out.

Many say that the president got rolled - again - in his "negotiations" with the Republicans, but I'm beginning to wonder if that is really true.  I wonder if he did not, in fact, get exactly what  he wanted.  Not to put too fine a point on it, I wonder if he is not really a closet Republican.  He seems to be moving farther and farther to the right, and I don't think it's just a political maneuver.  I think it is where his heart truly lies.  I think he is channeling Dwight Eisenhower.  Without the courage.

So where do we go from here?  What's a liberal to do?  Well, we can keep speaking out.  We can refuse to shut up, and we can look to next year's elections.

I do not believe for one second that people knew what they were getting when they voted for this Congress.  Our best hope for the future is to find ways to educate voters about the folly of having a "tea-bagger" government. Our best hope for the future is to elect a new and more forward-looking Congress, one that acknowledges science and the need for a functioning government, one that may force our closet-Republican president to move farther to the left. We must "screw our courage to the sticking place" and be audacious in the pursuit of that goal.

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