Fiscal Cliff Deal Sucks. But Don't Blame Congress.

Happy New Year.  Welcome to the era of soak-the-rich, tax-and-spend out-of-control-debt liberalism.  Enjoy.

As a conservative, I view the deal reached and passed by the Senate and then Congress is abysmal in terms of how it approaches the deficit problem.  It focuses on tax increases instead of the real problem - overspending.  It doesn't go far enough towards solving the problem and it smacks of Democrat win.  But the bill that originated in the Senate and was just passed by Congress and will surely get president Obama's signature while folly, is not the fault of Republicans, it's the fault of conservatives.

Yep - it's our fault.  The public sent more Democrats to Congress, and kept the balance of power in the Senate and returned president Unemployment to the White House.  Voters are responsible for the elected representatives making these abysmal decisions.  It's the fault of voters.

But with four years of Obama, conservatives had every opportunity to come up with a viable alternative.  Don't blame Republicans for the host of ersatz candidates.  We lost momentum and we paid the price with a lackluster cast of players.  And as far as an ill-informed electorate, we are to blame.  Yest the media has gone over-the-top in it's biased support of the president and the liberal agenda.  But that makes it incumbent upon us not to insulate ourselves from liberals and become an echo chamber of thoughts and ideas only to ourselves.  We need, will need and have always need to reach out to reachable voters and convince them of the soundness of our positions and the weakness of the liberal positions.  We didn't do that or to be more fair, we didn't do it nearly enough.

As I said immediately after the 2008 election, there's a lot of work to be done, and we've no time to lose in getting them done.