Hollow Principles: The New Instruments of Policy

Eric Cantor and John Boehner have come up with new policy instruments. Cantor's speciality is hollow principle blackmail. Boehner's is the rude guide to House management. Both men distract by their outrageousness from the real issues that are at the eye of the storm: the takeover of democracy by leveraging the system against itself. This domestic attack comes through legislative acts, state level executive decisions, a covering fire of denials and images, the use of budget controls to redirect revenues and tax policies, and applying pain until America surrenders to the hurt.

What is egregious is that government's founding was to preserve the common good, but Cantor replaces that with a ledger accounting of human pain to be balanced against a thin air principle that enables greed, supports blackmail, and denies the value of life beyond its impact on government's budgets.

America needs to let Cantor to know death and destruction are more than the pretense of accounting trade-offs or just another GM recall. The power of life is not his to hold hostage or to bring new calculus of cost to its dignity.