Emily: “What’s all this fuss I hear about endangered feces? That’s outrageous. Why is feces endangered? How can you possibly run out of such a thing? Just look around you–you can see it all over the place. And besides, who wants to save that anyway
Jane Curtin: ”Umm, Emily, the issue is actually endangered species, not feces.”
Emily: ”Oh… that’s different. Never mind”

Gilda Radner (Emily Litella) and Jane Curtin, original cast members of Saturday Night Live.

Imagine Emily Litella asking, “What’s all this fuss about ‘equestrian’?”  Maybe she’d speak to the distractions of horses’ southern regions as they prance around with their tails all propped high to allow for the poop to flow freely from them until it was pointed out to her that the word is ‘Sequestration’. “Oh… that’s different. Never mind”

Actually, that scenario is not far off the mark–high-paid elected officials from the President to the House to the Senate refusing to perform one of their most basic jobs while prancing round and spewing poop, followed by a cadre of entertainers dressed as journalists bent on finding a unique twist in that poop to feed it to the ignorant masses: me.

“The sky is falling, this is going to be bad–really bad–more bad than the last time, and the time before that, and the time…” This sequestration thing is an all-out circus eclipsing the fiscal cliff circus, itself eclipsing the superstorm circus; never mind that superstorm is a word without meaning, a subjective term to apply the appropriate amount of bad-ness to the event. The actual event was a tropical storm, maybe of the hurricane magnitude, but such objectivity has been lost today.

So Congress and the media are currently facing some trust issues–is it any wonder? Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low and journalists are racing to join them.

I suppose that journalists can’t really help themselves; they know from where their bread is buttered and it certainly isn’t us consumers. They are handsomely paid by their advertisers–a wonderful group of corporate interests that have found their own sustenance improved dramatically at the public trough. The Agriculture Trough, The Defense Trough, The Energy Trough, and myriad other troughs designed to funnel the resources of this great nation to those most capable of capitalizing on it while sticking our children and grandchildren with the resultant bills.

We now have a President who happens to be a Democrat and a Democrat-controlled Senate. These folks erroneously pretend popular mandate; in reality, they were simply the least unappealing. Regarding sequestration, the Democrats are using the media to forecast dire repercussions–jobs will be lost and planes grounded and meat inspections curtailed and drug trials unable to go forward because of cuts to defense, air traffic control, the Department of Agriculture and FDA, and state grants to acquire special prosecutors for drug cases, respectively.  The Democrats are adamant that any solution to their crisis include some sort of increase in revenue.

On the other side of this equation is the Republican controlled House of Representatives. These are the self-proclaimed salt of the earth folks who managed to lift themselves by their own bootstraps (gravity must play havoc on this). The Republicans will have nothing to do with an increase in revenue. It is their position that spending cuts alone can achieve the desired results if such spending cuts can reform entitlement programs–Social Security and Medicare. Republicans too are using the media to sow seeds of fear of the looming pain of sequestration.

Yet in the midst of this frenzy lies the solution! Entitlements are generally regarded as social welfare programs to provide a safety net for those in our society unable (Democrats) or unwilling (Republicans) to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. When Social Security was enacted in 1935, life expectancy was 67 years; now life expectancy is 78 years. Certainly this provides some room for compromise.

But why stop there? If our various corporate feeding troughs are nothing more than social welfare programs, does that not make them entitlements? Since corporations are now people, it seems logical to cut these entitlements. Perhaps through sequestration we’re staring the great compromise in the face and cannot see it through the haze of poop cast our direction by a well-behaved media.

Through this haze emerge our leaders, like well-fed horses’ asses.