Who will be holding the grenade in his shirt pocket on 26 January 2011?

As most of you Mediawingnutters are aware, the U.S. Congress raised the debt ceiling to $15.2 trillion on Aug. 2 after much after arguing the merits/demerits of raising taxes on the wealthy versus cutting Medicare, Social Security, et al. They ended up by “compromising” the issue(s) through one of the silliest political games ever concocted IMHO.

They created a Super Committee of six Democrats and six Republicans (above) to come up with a “plan” to cut $1.2 trillion from the budget by Thanksgiving or an automatic slice of $1.2 trillion would be required to be sliced from the budget—roughly 50-50 from Defense spending and entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Government Employee Pensions, etc.) by Congress in January (after Christmas). The National Debt had just hit $14.35 trillion at that point last summer forcing Congress into the box that created the Super Committee and its crazy undertaking.

Well, guess what? We (the National Debt) just hit $15 trillion this weekend give a day or two, and Judging by the roughly six and a half months it took the U.S. to add just $650 billion to the debt, it is likely that the U.S. will hit the debt ceiling again by the summer of 2012, just in time for a new round of political silliness as the presidential campaign season goes into warp speed.

Meanwhile, the so-called Super Committee of six Republicans and six Democrats are supposed to hammer out a deal to cut an additional $1.2 trillion from the budget before midnight on Wednesday (that is, in three days). Any bets that they discover what to cut at 23:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Eve? Would they really raise taxes on their wealthiest campaign contributors or even give up some of their own salaries by having the U.S. Government go to a three-day workweek?

Not likely!

Have fun, Barack Obama ... you will be guy with the grenade in your left shirt pocket—that is, the job of meeting the mandate to make the enormous cuts in early January (I’d recommend you do it randomly with a few Wheel of Fortune spins—and blame what happens on bad luck).

As for next summer when we hit the limit yet again, I’d suggest just smiling and discussing the upcoming World Series and then its highlights on MSNBC or CNN through November when one of the current Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (the Republican nominees—see previous posting) wins the Presidential Election—and the fun of handling the next time (soon, I’m sure) we hit the debt ceiling and becomes the last U.S. President of a fully financed government and turns off the lights in the White House as he or she walks out the door.