Ask Ayn Rand...John Boehner Is Being Wrongfully Defeated by a Horde of Weak-kneed Politicians and the Wall Street Journal

Speaker of the House John Boehner is right about not wanting to extend the payroll tax cuts until he can see the full year’s program and the means of paying for it.

The Wall Street Journal is absolutely wrong in its position that the GOP is harming itself or American workers or the country.

What we have watched today is a dishonorable flanking movement by the weak-kneed media and politics-as-usual Washington, led by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic President Barak Obama. They know how easy it is to round up a thousand Americans who need money, now more than ever, and who are able to tell honestly heart-wrenching stories about why the loss of $70-100 per month will hurt.

John Boehner knows how to do that, too, and if he had stooped to do it, he would have been the hero-for-a-day in a town where heroes are measured by their ability to cave in to any force that makes them vulnerable to losing the next election.

Boehner chose to stand tall. It is Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate Minority Leader, who caved.

When asked how he would have handled the deal differently than Obama, Mitt Romney, GOP presidential frontrunner said: “I would’ve met with the leaders. I would’ve brought them to the White House, and if they didn’t want to come to the White House, I would’ve gone to their offices. I would have sat down. Leaders are involved in the process as opposed to just standing back and just criticizing the people who are in the process. . . . The president should have been working with his leaders in his own party, and he should’ve been reaching across the aisle and find among Republicans those who he thinks could’ve come to common position with the Democrats.”

Newt Gingrich charged that Obama is a “campaigner in chief who has no interest in trying to solve America’s problems,” and offered a harsh criticism of Harry Reid, accusing the Senate Democratic leader of “deliberately game-playing” and “total dereliction of duty.”

Gingrich added: “The Senate passes what it wants and it leaves town — doesn’t wait around, it doesn’t act responsibly. I just think if you’re a normal American, you’re looking at this stuff, you just say, ‘What a total failure of leadership.’ ” He said he had “no idea how I would try to handle it if I was in John Boehner’s position because he’s got a Senate majority leader who is totally destructive. . . .”

Ayn Rand isn’t alive to comment on today’s shabby events, but long ago she had something to say that applies to today’s mess and the weaknesses of Washington and America, for it is now time to tell Americans that the problem is theirs and the solution or destruction of their country rests in their hands, not in passing off blame to those elected to go to Washington. It is time for Americans to take charge of their destiny because nobody else is going to do it for them.

Here is Ayn Rand’s comment from Atlas Shrugged. Think about it and pass it on to your congressmen, your Senators and President Obama. Tell Mr. Boehner you support him because he is right.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”