David Frum to GOP: Stop Flirting with Debt Disaster

David Frum is one of the increasingly rare species of rational conservative. As a one time member of the GOP - an activist even - I am continually amazed at the ever increasing insanity and hypocrisy of today's GOP. As I've noted before, to be a member of the GOP base one must be either clinically insane, horrifically ignorant, or have had a lobotomy. And at the leadership level, demagoguery seems to be all that folks like Boehner and Virginia embarrassment, Eric Cantor , seem to know. In a column on his blog, Frum Forum, Frum takes the GOP to task and warns them of the potential self-destruction the party is courting with its deficit reduction games. Given the quickly tarnishing shine of the GOP in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states, Frum's warnings seem well placed. Here are some highlights:
*
Here is John Boehner speaking last week to the New York Economic Club: It’s true that allowing America to default would be irresponsible. But it would be more irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without simultaneously taking dramatic steps to reduce spending and reform the budget process.
*
Wrong! Default would be the single most irresponsible thing the United States of America could possibly do. America’s debt has been paid in full and on time since 1789. To cast away that record even in a genuine financial emergency would be a terrifying action. To cast away that record to score a political point? Reckless almost beyond description.

*
I always assumed that the first American political party to contemplate default as a way to achieve its political goals would be the Communist Party of the USA, not the GOP. I’m going to tell myself that it’s all just a bluff, and that Boehner is talking wild as a prelude to lowering the boom on the Tea Party. But wild talk has a way of generating its own momentum – and leading to wild results.
*
[W]hat this default talk looks like is that the GOP wants a crisis, not a deal. A deal would involve real pain for real voters: Medicare reductions, farm spending reductions, military reductions, and revenue measures. A crisis creates an exciting substitute for such a deal – especially if the GOP can temporarily and delusively convince itself that it can pin the blame for the crisis on President Obama. That will not be true. The whole world will see that the crisis was avoidable, and will see who insisted on forcing it. And however high you imagine the financial and political price – it will be higher.