Well Played Mr. President!

"Last night, old man, you did it!
You did it! You did it! You said that you would do it,
And indeed you did. I thought that you would rue it;
I doubted you'd do it. But now I must admit it
That succeed you did. You should get a medal"

You Did It!

My Fair Lady

Bravo, Mr. President! Well done! Well played! Kudos! Bravo Zulu! Last night you managed to cobble a coalition of the unwilling, and together, in the wee hours on the morning, you managed to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! You played those hapless Republicans like a violin once again. Poor Mitch - he was the one you really worked over. Somehow, whether it was drug induced or not, he agreed to go from a ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases (which you promised you would do in the run up to the last election) of 3.5 to 1, to a bill which had a whopping ratio of 1 to 41! How did you do it? Not only did you screw Mitch right into the ground, but you left him smiling after the assault!

There is only one very small, very minute problem with your happy dance - nothing was fixed. In fact, the projected debt grew again last night - by over $3T dollars. Don't worry about it - the lemmings on Wall Street are going to send the market up like a roman candle this morning once it opens. You see, in our "day trading" mentality, we don't care about the future if it goes beyond this quarter, or even this month. That is a problem for another day. Speaking of which, how is that new debt limit coming? Oh yea - that stinky dropping is coming up and it is just over the horizon.

Was the deal all bad? Nope - not a bit. To FINALLY make most of the previously "hated" Bush tax cuts permanent was a good thing. Even better, was we finally were able to do something we should have done years ago. Fix that damn AMT thing. Now that is behind us unless a future Congress unravels part of this "permanent" fix. Other than that, the bill was a total loser. Did NOTHING to fix or even slow down the run away debt issue. Stay tuned on that one.

To quote our former nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in less than two months we are going to be enjoined in the "Mother of all battles". It is going to be ugly. Nasty. Surprise, surprise - the sequester was not addressed. In fact, it was kicked down the street. Wow - we never did that before! But, the day of reckoning will soon be upon us. Not only dealing with the sequester (by the way, I don't have a CLUE how that will work!) but also raising or not raising the debt ceiling once again.

The only thing that will keep this from being a political Armageddon will be the tag teaming of Barry and Biden to work over Mitch once again. We could end up with another plate of pablum and a promise to "take care of this most important issue" at a later date. Right now it is gun control and immigration that is burning a hole in Barry. He wants to be on these as soon as yesterday. Debts and debt limits are as exciting to him as watching paint dry.

So once again Mr. President, nice job. The old saying use to be "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me". No more. You have managed to fool us time and time again and we keep coming back for more. Thank you sir, for starting the new year off on the right foot. I will now send my kids the bill for what we all signed up to last night.