Lemmings are smarter than that

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Lemmings don't really plunge en mass off cliffs into the water to drown. They, unlike people, are smarter than that.

People are quite willing to follow the leader into a mass suicide. Blind, unswerving and fanatical devotion is nothing much new. Of recent times consider Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, Barack Obama.

(Aside - Ye presidential supporters and haters of Bush, please list for me 5 policies started by Bush which were not continued by the current president. Yeah. )

Historically, the record of humanity is packed with people who are willing to plunge off a cliff in "support" of a leader.

Most animals don't act that way. Some cetaceans, for reasons we don't understand, do. I suspect they are Reboobicans or Damnocrats.

The looming plunge du jour is the Fiscal Cliff which has some people worried. Not me. Not in the slightest.

In the first place, this "fiscal cliff" is an artificial creation of Congress. No action by a legislative body is permanent except for a decision to disband.

In other words, the "fiscal cliff" was created by Congress. It can be magically dispelled, negated, vanished, deleted, postponed or otherwise removed by an Act of Congress.

I say magically and I mean it. It is magic.

You are welcome to disagree. I ask you to explain it then.

Your explanation must eventually come down to one simple fact. Congress created this situation. Congress can decide to fix the situation.

You may say that is not magic. I disagree.

This how the fed works

The convolutions, contortions and distortions of Congress cannot be explained completely, fully and totally. Cannot. You can get "experts" in any field to discuss Congress and get diametrically opposing views. They can even use math to prove their points.

Congress conducts mysterious ceremonies with secretive rites and lots of invocations and WHOA! Stuff happens.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I agree. But with Congress, there ain't no technology involved. It's nothing more than a group of people in an arcane ritual after which things happen.

Unless Hari Seldon steps out of hiding, I will continue to insist it is magic. But even Hari had to rely on the paranormal eventually.

So there is no fiscal cliff looming. It is an illusion created by magicians to divert American attention from the real issues at hand. It can be dispelled by the magic of Congress or by anyone who's really willing to look through the holographic projection.

The problem is Americans prefer illusions. This "fiscal cliff" is going to be used as an excuse to continue this road to perdition which we are rightly zooming down in our Chinese-made grass-woven carrying apparatus and the vast majority of people are gonna buy it.

I'll bet you 80 percent of the nation cannot remember the last "fiscal cliff" of a few years ago and how the nation got through that. Three years from now, this bit of magic will be forgotten as well.