Eugene Robinson: Our clown-around Congress : Stltoday

Eugene Robinson: Our clown-around Congress : Stltoday


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To say that Congress looked like a clown show last week is an insult to self-respecting clowns.
Painful though it may be, let’s review what just happened. Our august legislators — aided and abetted by President Obama — manufactured a fake crisis. They then proceeded to handle it so incompetently that they turned it into a real one.

The bogus “fiscal cliff” — and please, let’s never, ever use those words again — was designed as a doomsday mechanism to force Congress and the president to make tough decisions. But resistance to the very concept of decision-making was so fierce that our leaders could only manage to avoid hurtling to their doom, and ours, by deciding not to decide much of anything.