Month: August 2011

A Note from Hobbiton

Recently Senator John McCain, speaking to the issue of raising the debt ceiling, read an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article comparing the Tea Party folks to Hobbits, the fictional little people of the Tolkien novels. This is what was read:

"The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue and the public will turn en masse against Barack Obama…. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea party hobbits could return to Middle-earth having defeated Mordor. This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees."

The author of the article warned, and McCain concurred that “…if conservatives defeat the Boehner plan, they’ll not only undermine their House majority. They’ll go far to re-electing Mr. Obama and making the entitlement state that much harder to reform.”

As you know, the Boehner plan passed, Standard and Poor’s went ahead and downgraded the nation’s credit rating, and the bottom fell out of the market.

So, the blame game began. The ruling class in Washington called out the Tea Party and so-called Tea Party Republicans in the House for causing the downgrade. However, the day after the downgrade a spokesman for S&P essentially argued the Tea Party’s position when justifying the credit rating downgrade…politicians in Washington have to get spending under control.

My beef with McCain is that he will praise the Tea Party when it is to his advantage but assail them when it is not. That has always been my problem with McCain…he grazes on both sides of the fence. Pick an ideology, John. That’s one of the reasons you are not president.

But I also have a beef with the author of the WSJ piece. The Hobbits did not “return to Middle-earth having defeated Mordor.” They returned to Hobbiton in the Shire after the evil Sauron and the armies of Mordor had been defeated by a fellowship of man, elf, dwarf, and hobbit. Think of Middle-earth as the United States, Mordor as Washington, D.C., and Sauron as Obama. If you are going to use a literary analogy, at least get it right. – Lew –