Supercommittee fraud

That's probably the wrong word. I'm not sure you can call something a fraud when, from the beginning, no one ever expected anyone to believe it was anything but. 

Republican candidates are calling Obama out for his lack of leadership here. He's no leader, but let's not pretend that his involvement in the process would have resulted in an agreement to cut government. That's just laughable.

John Podhoretz:

The supercommittee triumphed in accomplishing what it was truly intended to accomplish.

It was created to kick the can down the road. The only thing that mattered was that it come into existence, and it did. Its invention made increases in the debt ceiling possible through the end of President Obama’s term.

Oh, the supercommittee’s putative purpose was to find massive spending cuts and tax hikes acceptable to both Democrats and Republicans. Then, after achieving this supernatural goal, it was to place these historic changes before Congress, the president and the American people and solve America’s spiraling debt problem at no political cost to anyone.

That scenario was a transparent absurdity. Indeed, it was so absurd that committee members couldn’t even go through the motions of pretending to fulfill it. Politico’s Mike Allen informs us that the supercommittee never actually met during the month of November.

Let me repeat that: As the deadline of Thanksgiving rapidly approached, the supercommittee members couldn’t be bothered to sit in the same room together.

This just proves that it was there just to get us to Thanksgiving. Thursday is Thanksgiving. The supercommittee’s work is done.

The lament that the supercommittee was unable to make a deal is ridiculous — because the supercommittee itself was the deal.

Mark Steyn:

. . . the timidity of the GOP frontrunners is far more disturbing. In a sane polity, they would be competing over the abolition of departments, the rollback of regulatory tyranny, the shrinking of entitlements – not to mention flying commercial and making do with a mere 20-car motorcade. This close to the abyss, public discourse is nowhere near where it ought to be.

And that's part of the plan:

Michael Walsh:

That’s because at least one side in this cold civil war never wanted to succeed in the first place. “The worm has turned a little bit,” one Democratic aide was quoted as saying by Politico. “The national conversation now is about income inequality and about jobs, and it’s not really about cutting the size of government anymore or cutting spending.”

So the super committee’s failure was preordained, as the Dems have thrown in their lot with Obama’s demonize-the-productive-class 2012 campaign. They’re trying to change the subject from bloated government, a complex and unfair tax code and out-of-control entitlement spending to a “soak the rich” sham populism exemplified by the recent Occupy Wall Street movement. They’re even willing to risk another downgrade of the country’s credit rating to get the president re-elected.

Back to Steyn:

Another downgrade is now inevitable. After that, all that’s holding the joint up is the dollar’s status as global currency. If the world were looking around for a reserve currency today, I doubt it would pick that of a $15 trillion sinkhole. This week’s failure will hasten the urge of the Chinese and others to arrange a post-dollar order. I wrote earlier this year about America’s inclination to do everything big. And so it goes even with imperial eclipse: We are inviting nothing so genteel as “decline” but rather a sudden convulsive collapse.

Michelle Malkin calls for new blood:

The disease: Entrenched incumbency.
The cure? Fresh fiscal conservative blood.
Remember in November.

Will it help? This Congress, and a long line of Congresses before it, have proven they utterly lack the will to cut spending and reduce government. It's anathema to them. Perhaps a big enough change will be effected next November to alter course. But it seems most likely that our inevitable downsizing can only happen the hard way, a la Steyn.

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Updated to add John Hayward's take:

No sooner had the Super Committee formally announced that it couldn’t reach a deal on deficit reduction than the howling leadership void in the Oval Office dispersed and President Obama appeared, dressed in his ridiculous “deficit hawk” costume and issuing dire warnings to those who would try to escape the doom of sequestration.

You must read the rest.

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Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

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