Who to blame? The GOP, of course

People will try to tell you that all politicians are equally to blame for this political dysfunction by which our nation has flirted with downgraded credit, debt default and global economic turmoil.

They merely will be providing insulation for those really mostly to blame.

So let us peel away such insulation. Let us lay it out in order of blame:

1. Tea party extremists in the Congress, who are penny wise and pound foolish.

Yes, we experienced severe political dysfunction before the tea party insurgence. But we didn't play chicken and Russian roulette quite this way with our economy.

Tea partiers cite surely wasted millions that indeed should be reformed. But they do so in the course of objecting to an essential increase in the debt ceiling, a matter of already owed trillions, that could permit us to continue to function as we must as a responsible credit risk.

That is to say that tea partiers sweat the small stuff and threaten ruination on the big stuff.

A tea party guy wants me to expose a few million dollars spent on remote rural airstrips where there might be two or three planes in the hangars. He sees this as symptomatic of a greater waste and inefficiency, which, actually, it might be.

But only if we attended sanely to the debt we rightfully owe already could we then turn our attention in two vital directions: One would be to reform the spending we know must be reformed, from the marginal millions of earmarks to the uncontrolled billions on Medicare. The second would be to determine what, if anything, the government could possibly do at this point to help liberate cowering employers and investors so the economy might get sparked in some way.

Frankly, speaking only for me: I'd repeal the new health care reform law, as urgently needed as universal health insurance surely is, if I could be sure that employers would begin hiring absent the hovering cloud of its fiscal uncertainty.

Ours is a delicate balance between the private marketplace that we embrace only to an extent and the semi-socialist backstop we've assembled to catch those who fall through the private marketplace's cracks.

Delicate economic balance of that sort requires delicate political compromise and the eschewing of philosophical absolutes, which the tea party simply will not abide.

2. Mainstream Republicans in the Congress, because they could have fallen in behind Speaker John Boehner's twice-aborted adult discussions with President Obama. Instead they cowered and tucked tail as soon as the kook caucus on the right fringe invoked the specter of primary opposition from the strident extreme.

3. All of us in the great American apolitical center, "independents" who go one way in one election and the other in the next.

We rely so blithely on the fat that easy debt provides that we disengage from politics as if it is dirty and beneath us. Thus we leave a political void that extremists of both philosophical persuasions, with their mutually polarizing passion and noise and money, are all too happy to fill.

We want our mortgage interest deduction. We want our tax-deferred retirement savings. We like our tax cut. We want our distant wars won. We want those terrorists spied on, stopped and caught.

If a senior citizen, you want your Social Security and Medicare and for your champions in the AARP to rise up with attack ads against Congress whenever your doctor or hospital whines to you that the government is trying to cut reimbursements.

You decry special interests. But aren't you special? Don't you have interests?

In a government designed by and for the people, the buck stops with the people.

4. Fox News, because it exacerbates the above.

Why no blame for Democrats? I ran out of space, that's all. The strident leftists, moveon.org and the talking heads on MSNBC, would surely be coming up shortly.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.