No Debt Ceiling Battle A Bitter Pill

◼ As tough as it is for fiscal hawks like myself, tea party conservatives, and anyone concerned about America's spending problem there is a strategy here which we have to swallow. In time we will see if the strategy plays out well for the Republicans. - David Webb/Breitbart's Conversation

Politically, and this is important, a debt ceiling fight / shut down battle would give the Democrats more political bullets. Political reality is if your opponent has the gun, you don't buy them the bullets. One vote is important and always is but in this case it may be future multiple votes and voters that matter for those of us that are again disappointed in no change in Federal government spending habits.

This does allow Republicans to focus on Obamacare going into 2014 in both the Senate and the house. Speaker Boehner, the Republican leadership and even Democrats will go home next week to many Americans like me who are angry at the repeated congressional failures to be responsible and cut spending. Boehner and his Republican cohorts had better fight hard to accomplish the correct policies for America between now and November 2014.

◼ Filling our monthly bitter-pill subscription - John Hayward/Breitbart's Conversation

The real problem is not so much the intractable Barack Obama as the intractable and invisible Harry Reid. Reid is the hit man who quietly murders every good bill to emerge from the Republican House. On the rare occasions when someone at the press bothers to point a camera at him, the results are sickening and repulsive to the American people ("Why should I care about kids with cancer when government employees are suffering?") but that almost never happens. The public doesn't know how he scuttles pro-growth House bills or "fills the amendment tree" to poison legislation. They blame the Republican Party in a nebulous sense for do-nothing gridlock, when it's really this one guy who is personally responsible for most of it. His invisibility means President Obama never has to pay the political price for openly vetoing bills that would sound great to the voters. For whatever reason, the GOP leadership doesn't even try to explain that to the American people.

Instead, the GOP leadership accepts a media narrative that blames them for everything, especially when they think some of the blame can be dumped on those conservative and Tea Party upstarts they hate. They fight internal battles with glee, but shrink from external conflicts with the Democrats, afraid to use anything resembling the fiery language routinely deployed against them.