Happy New Year. I’m Exhausted.

Two months of fighting, arguing, trying to explain that Obama’s tax hikes will do nothing to address the problems dragging down the economy, for this? Go read the entire Daily Caller piece if you want the details, but here’s the summary:

Washington DC punted… again.

It was a shank, too. Barely getting over the original line of scrimmage. The deal, much heralded by the Beltway Bubble (aka the media) as a success for Obama and a defeat for Republicans, was a weak punt that literally does nothing more than extend tax rates that have been in effect for 11 years with a few things Congress was already going to do (i.e. Doc Fix) thrown in. This is not cause for celebration. It should be a jarring wake up call to the American people that our elected leaders are simply incapable of fixing what needs to be fixed. Instead, they prance about creating a crisis over something that was easy so that it looks like something happened.

Nothing happened.

Oh, taxes went up on people who make more than $400K per year. But that is not going to scratch the current deficit because… well, just look at this chart.

 

Hi!

This, my friends, is what you call “a joke.” It’s actually true, but it’s a joke. Washington DC is a joke. Obama and the Democrats are a joke. Republican leadership is a joke. And until conservatives in elected office figure out how to explain things to the American people effectively, they’re a joke too.

I’m so tired. If you follow me on Twitter (highly recommended, by the way) you know that I’ve been ranting and raving about the ridiculous game Democrats and the media (the Democrat Media Complex) set up which is rigged to prevent solutions that work from ever getting a fair hearing. The Beltway Bubble has an uncanny ability to shift from opinion journalism when “experts” are needed to explain why Republicans are wrong to straight news when Obama is being an incoherent buffoon. You’ve seen it. When a Republican, particularly a conservative Republican, says something that makes sense, the media trots out the “experts” – always “scholars” from think-tanks that just happen to be funded by liberals – to explain how it doesn’t makes sense. Then, when Obama says crazy stuff like “this was a balanced approach” the media frames the criticism as “Republicans say…” in order to make it seem like the objection is only partisan.

We can’t win this game. We will continue to lose if we refuse to learn this lesson. We will continue to get moronic “solutions” like this fiscal cliff deal if we don’t learn this lesson. The game was designed to defeat conservative ideas. And it works. Republicans don’t get it. Most conservatives don’t get it.

There are a few conservatives who do get it, and even they frustratingly play along with the game when there’s a short term benefit for them. Like, for example, when there’s a Republican they really don’t like who is getting blamed for stuff Obama is doing (with the media’s help, naturally). These conservatives will join the media chorus against said Republican in order to, hopefully, increase their power within the movement. It may work in the short run, but they will get crushed in the long run.

We need to step back. We have to accept reality: It is going to be at least a generation before we start to recover from the disaster the Obama Cult has wrought. We have to stop looking to the current crop of jokes in Washington for real solutions. They’re beyond fixing. The conservative movement has to go local.

The only way we will fix the structural problems with our federal government is to explain the case directly to the public. We have to bypass the Democrat Media Complex. A lot of people in our movement have lost faith in the American people. I’ll admit that I have too at times. But it’s our only hope. Obama is rarely right, but he was that one time when he said you can’t fix Washington from the inside. (I know I made fun of him when he said it, but that’s because when Obama says “fix” he really means “make things worse.”) Nothing substantive will get done in Washington until people understand that the progressive agenda doesn’t work.

I don’t know how, exactly, we begin to make this change with the American public, but I do know there are a lot of really talented people within our movement who are currently wasting their time trying to influence Washington without the public behind them. They’ve got it backwards. I believe if they stepped back and flipped the strategy around, focused on educating the public first, that we could create the groundswell necessary to usher in some sanity to DC.

I’m exhausted. Thinking about the work that needs to be done makes me more so. I don’t have the resources – besides writing here and on Twitter – to knock some sense into the heads of people with the resources to make something happen. My hope is that they read this and start thinking of a new strategy. I’ll offer what I can – mainly because no one will ever shut me up – but we have to stop playing the Left’s game.

Fast.