The tiny kingdom of Draconia, located near Galt’s Gulch, is a model of small government. The people elect a teenage girl as the Queen of their small government every two years, and she spends most of her time slashing the budget. This leaves little funding for defense, which makes them vulnerable to conquest by horrendously incompetent armies of Tinkertoy robots, but like the rest of the free world they enjoy American military protection.
Democrats talk about Draconia all the time. The recent budget deal they reached with Republicans was loudly condemned as a package of Draconian cuts. Since Draconia does not have either public education or welfare for the elderly, every proposed reduction in taxpayer funding for the teachers’ unions or Medicare in the United States is described as Draconian.
One might guess, from studying the grammar of liberals, that “Draconian” is a synonym for “huge,” but it actually means “tiny” – probably a reference to the small size of the kingdom. The Congressional Budget Office just got finished scoring that $38 billion spending cut deal, which the Democrats tried to block by threatening to shut down the government and stop the paychecks of our military forces. It turns out the deal only saves $352 million from non-military accounts this year.
As described by Fox News, the problem is that only $8 billion of the cuts were going to hit domestic spending and foreign aid this year, and that’s largely offset by military spending increases, including the budget for the fabulously expensive quagmire President Obama brewed up in Libya. Last Monday, the Pentagon announced the cost of U.S. involvement in Libya has reached $608 million, and will continue to rack up expenses of $40 million per month for the indefinite future. For this outlay, we get an aerial view of Qaddafi kicking the crap out of the hapless rebels. To be fair, we did slow down the pace of the “humanitarian tragedy” somewhat, and relocate it from Benghazi to Misrata, where regime forces reportedly killed 23 civilians today.
Defenders of the deal say that more of its savings will be realized in years to come, and of course this battle was only a warm-up for the big budget fights to come. Everyone in the Tea Party has grown tired of science-fiction stories about a future filled with spending cuts that never quite materialize. Perhaps thinking of the big-budget movie director George Lucas based loosely on the kingdom of Draconia, Republican representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas said the budget deal is a menace based on “phantom savings.” It doesn’t even cover the ridiculous federal spending on ObamaCare and abortion, as those were split off into separate bills, to satisfy Democrat demands.
28 House Republicans have signaled their intention to vote against the deal, and other conservatives are said to be increasingly “skittish” about it. Ironically, Skittish is a small town on the coast of Draconia. It has a lovely memorial garden, where the ashes of John Boehner’s Speakership will be scattered, if the smoke and mirrors of this “$38 billion spending reduction” do not hide much bigger things to come… or if that skittish Republican caucus actually manages to kill the deal he made last week, and the government shuts down after all.
