This entire fiscal cliff business could be avoided by simply ignoring the Republicans outright. Pretend they're not there. They're the ones most insistent that the sequester will doom (defense!) things, they're the ones foaming at the mouth about how all these efforts America took at their insistence to cut the stupid debt right now because Austeritah are, as it turns out, going to kill us all in our sleep. But after all that hostage taking and supercommittees and very serious three-page pamphlets with big pictures and zero math and now the fiscal cliiiiiiff, the only solutions they're proposing are (1) to cut taxes on rich people yet-a-freaking-gain, and (2) to pay for that by effing up other people's Medicare. That's a worse plan than doing nothing. It's so stupid and self-serving a plan that Very Important Republicans on the teevee go to great lengths to avoid even having to say it out loud.

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If Republicans want to be the party of screwing people out of their promised benefits, or of making people work at their damn minimum wage jobs until they're 90 billion years old, or the party of not feeding children, or the party of not giving a damn about anyone who doesn't have at least three homes and 12 cars, let them. But let them own that, and argue for it themselves, and spell out exactly what it is they want in policy and legislation without all this sniffling about how the Democrats need to propose all of that for them. If they want to screw people, they should at least have the ideological courage to say who they want to screw.