Who's Afraid of Grover Nordquist?

I'm really beginning to freak out.  I thought by now that cooler heads would prevail and our elected officials would finally be working together to solve the problem of a possible technical default on our nation's debt. 

Then yesterday I was watching the news and saw an unbelievable scene.  It was a number of talking heads speculating together on what Grover Nordquist might think about possible options to the impasse.  Today we saw our answer.  In an early morning radio call he said a discontinuation of the Bush-era tax cuts--which had always been meant to be temporary anyway--wouldn't be considered a rise in tax rates.  This gave a lot of people the impression that a bi-partisan deal might be imminent.  A little while later, Nordquist was heard to say that allowing tax rates to return to their prior levels would not be acceptable. 

So it turns out the nation's no-tax Nazi--who wants to drown the government in a bathtub and is considered the most powerful man in the world who doesn't sleep in the White House--doesn't know what he wants or what his no-tax pledge means.  Now people who have signed his pledge are shaking in their boots and resorting to reading tea leaves to understand how Nordquist would have them vote. 

Here's my message to Nordquist.  If he doesn't want to pay taxes, why doesn't he just move to Somalia and change his citizenship?  Let's see how he survives in a place with no public security or infrastructure of any kind.  Let him try his pledge out over there first before exposing us to the nonsense.  I'm sure he'd learn a lesson or two about the need to maintain our nation's public assets.  (Not that all public assets are necessary--I'd be willing to see a significant reduction in weapons systems if it meant we could bring our educational standards to levels shared by other industrialized countries).  In the meanwhile, we would do well to be rid of the man and his form of blackmail.