“I’d love to get everybody to take a pledge to take no more pledges.” - Jon Huntsman, GOP candidate for president.
That was the best line of the GOP debate this week. Unfortunately, it way too reasonable for Tea Party reactionaries and other fringe right wingers, many who reside in the current Congress.
If more Republicans felt like Huntsman, we would have avoided the entire debt ceiling debacle. We'd also have more intelligent and productive debates on other pressing issues that require compromise and adult conversations.
No-tax pledges taken by most Republicans, which is what Huntsman was referring to, are simply idiotic. And any politician who handcuffs themselves by taking similar pledges isn't doing his or her job. We pay these politicians to analyze and vote on each issue independently. To use their own minds and to listen to our needs. We don't pay them to limit their abilities to negotiate by taking parochial pledges, the kind of pledge one takes in order to gain membership into a tree house club at 8 years old or to get into fanatical, narrow-minded cults as adults.
Extraordinarily difficult times demand that we move away from pledges made to people and organizations who no one elected. That's right, I am not even going to mention G.N. or his group by name because I don't one one single hit on my blog to come from anyone searching those names. He already gets way too much media attention. I don't want to be part of the problem.
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