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.

Succinct Summary of 2012

In short, 2012 sucked from a conservative perspective.  America re-elected the wrong guy.  If all you want to read is the headline, you can stop there.  But slightly less succinct is the following summary.

There were some horrible shootings in Connecticut and Colorado.   While this part is not news, liberal Democrats blamed the guns rather than the shooters. 

Republicans nominated a weak nominee in one Mitt Romney.  While this part was completely predictable, many conservatives thought on the strength of one VP selection, one conservative speech and one good debate soundly defeating Obama, he was suddenly a cinch to win the White House.

Not Mayans, it's Democrats' debt that flood America.

Despite massive unemployment and crushing new Obama-induced debt, President Obama won the White House, proving many polls correct and many polls wrong.  What happened to the polls?  Predictably Republicans were left scratching their heads.

Meanwhile Republicans maintained control of the Congress and Democrats kept the Senate.   America, foolishly voted for the status quo.  Foolishly? Yes, because...

Finally, the fiscal cliff on the Bush Tax rates and government spending cap and the sequester mandated cuts to the military and social programs looms with only days left to reach an agreement.  President Obama seems to be fine with the cliff diving.  He has tactical reasons to be okay with it.  Meanwhile Republicans will not come out of this looking good.  They look disorganized, they're still being unfairly portrayed as the party looking out for the rich rather than for everyone, and they are going to get caught seemingly reactive to new plans from the president.

Meanwhile in foreign affairs, the world became a much less safe place because president Nobel Peace Prize,  Captain Capitulate & Apologize just doesn't get it.  Everything else, from the Mayan Apocalypse to Whitney Houston is not that relevant. 

Tracking The Unemployment Rate

Today the unemployment rate dipped to 7.7%, surprising people, modestly, with the slightly better than expected result.  There's danger for conservatives in tracking the unemployment rate too closely.  With such a high unemployment rate we expected Obama to lose the election - he didn't, defying the odds as far as unemployment is concerned.  

There other other reasons not to fixate on the unemployment rate.