WHERE DID ALL THE GROWN-UPS GO?

By H. N. Burdett

"Grandpa, aren't you scared?" my 16-year-old grandson asked the other day, minutes before we sat down to dinner.

"Of what?" I asked.

"I was watching Boehner and Obama (on television)," he said. "It was like two parents fighting and I'm scared, aren't you?"

"Right, or like a couple of kids squabbling on the playground," I responded. "I'm concerned, but not frightened. It's all political posturing, gamesmanship. What this is really all about is next year's national elections. Opposing parties jockeying for position, each trying to set themselves up as the savior and the other as the villain. But don't worry. A deal will be struck on the debt ceiling. The country is not going to default on its debt."

Later that evening when I thought about that brief colloquy, I wondered if I wasn't whistling past the graveyard. In the end, I remained optimistic.

Impressive as the Republican members in Congress may be in rigidly repeating Frank Luntz's slogans and talking points, the feeling lingers that, with the tea party breathing down their necks, they are intent upon driving a stake through the GOP's heart and taking the country along with it as collateral damage.

Dr. Luntz is the wizard of ooze who came up with the "fair and balanced" tagline for Fox News, though anyone who is not blind, deaf or stupid knows it is neither. An acknowledged master of metaphor, he is the linguistic field general who has devised a brilliant campaign to solidify his valid premise that words matter in politics, business, relationships, and everywhere else.

Luntz has been working at this for years. He is the genius who turned global warming into "climate change" and the mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have swallowed it whole. Never mind that the world is experiencing the highest annual temperatures ever recorded and that a hunk of the Arctic the size of Rhode Island has melted.

Luntz's fingerprints are all over more recent constructions repetitively parroted by GOP congressmen in the debt ceiling debate: "job creators" to redefine and thereby justify corporate welfare in the form of unconscionable tax breaks, and "don't let them write a blank check" to demonize Democrats protecting Social Security and Medicare.

During congressional floor speeches by Republicans, just try counting how many times they use those two terms. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, was a master of the same strategy. Goebbels said if you keep repeating a lie, it will become conventional wisdom.

On the debt ceiling debacle, Fred Thompson, the movie and television actor and former United States Senator from Tennessee, is among the few actual grown-ups in his party. Thompson, once an aspirant for the GOP presidential nomination, cuts to the chase. Observing that the Republicans are getting most of exacly what they want in the debt ceiling deal, he says they should just shut up, vote and declare victory.

It should be noted that the tea party had not surfaced as the dominant political influence on the Republican party when Thompson was in the political arena. And the tea party is the tail wagging that dog, much to the chagrin of moderate members of the party -- a diminishing breed on the fast track to extinction.

One current U.S. Senator who pushes back at the tea party loonies is none other than the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain of Arizona.

No longer harboring illusions of ascending to the presidency, McCain, who famously declined to buckle to torture in the Hanoi Hilton where he was confined during the Vietnam war, is reclaiming his torn and tattered maverick mantle.

He opposes the tea party's insistence that raising the debt ceiling should be linked to a Constitutional amendment mandating a balanced Federal budget. He calls such nonsense in the guise of don't-tread-on-me patriotism "foolish" and "bizarro."

By so doing, the Arizona senator once again becomes the pain in his party's posterior he was when he co-sponsored that long-standing GOP anathema, political campaign reform.

Any business unable to keep its books balanced can start counting the days when its doors must shut permanently. The family designee in charge of monitoring household expenses knows that spending beyond the budget means doing without not only luxuries but necessities. Virtually every state in the union prohibits its lawmakers from spending money that just is not there.

What makes the Federal government unique is that it is the states' banker of last resort. When Hurricane Katrina ravished parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, those states turned to the Federal government for relief. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he did not turn to the private sector to finance his folly; in fact, some portions of the latter profited rather handsomely.

Should Congress be bound by Constitutional fiat to balance the budget -- a key condition exacted by the tea party for a debt ceiling deal -- the United States, arguably the wealthiest and most admired country in the world, would have to throw itself at the mercy of the global community for emergency relief and unforeseeable urgent contingencies.

A balanced budget as a guiding principle of our Federal government would turn the United States into a virtual Third World country. Those six or seven of every 10 Americans who believe this is a great idea should go back to their high school civics texts and try reading and understanding them.

Better yet, the tea party and its conservative sheep should exert special effort to comprehend the Constitution they claim to revere. The tea party cult would sooner rather than later learn that a balanced budget amendment would be on a one-way collision course with that document's general welfare clause. They would not only lose the argument, but have no recourse but to fold their leaky tents and close shop.

Amid the bickering, back-biting and bombast that has turned the U.S. Congress into an object of contempt by the very electorate that puts its members into office, I remain confident that an eleventh-hour agreement will be reached. More than likely it will be a jerrybuilt mess, full of flaws, a patchwork quilt that will be of little more use than applying Band-aids to cancer.

But it will somehow squeeze us through our current debt dilemma. The Triple-A bond rating of the planet's most admired nation will remain in grave jeopardy and the global economy will feel our pain.

All Americans should vehemently resent allowing our country to become beholden to no-nothing, tea party mania. We should resent frightening the next generation into glimpsing into their future and seeing only bleak, cold darkness -- a future that will find it worse off than the preceding generation for the first time in American history.

To paraphrase the come-uppance for that notorious bull in the national china shop, Sen. Joe McCarthy, we must ask our elected officials on Capitol Hill: Has it come to this gentlemen? Have you no decency? Have you no shame?