Credibility Gap May Be Looming

The parties on both sides of all the ongoing fiscal showdowns in Washington are expressing concern that the whole show may be nearing the believability cliff.

Said Wendel Pence, senior bipartisan political strategist on hiatus from the reality TV industry, “I’m not sure how much longer these professed nemeses can keep up the array of pretenses swirling around the chief pretense that these leaders playing protagonist to the other side’s antagonist don’t all have the same goal of appeasing the same corporate lords.

“It’s an intriguing theatrical question, really. How do two outwardly mortal enemies in the war for America’s economic future maintain for their audience the illusion of dramatic conflict when they completely agree on such unbelievably nonsensical premises as the absurd notions that it’s not the corporate lords making up and spreading the blatant lie that it’s time to fix the deficit; that Social Security has anything to do with the deficit that nobody truly cares about fixing anyway even if it were time to fix the deficit, which it isn’t; that the classes that have already been brutally sacrificed on the altar of neoliberalism need in these brutal economic times to now share the sacrifice with the corporate lords who have spent the last generation making an unprecedented killing off of neoliberalism while creating all the need for sacrifices to now be made.”

Stoking fears among the nation’s political leaders that they may soon be sailing together by themselves into the so-called Credibility Gap is an ongoing fMRI study being conducted by Dr. Saatyaki Amin, Head of Neuropolitical Research at Johns Hopkins University.

Said Dr. Amin, “In current trials, as we expose subjects to more clips of the typical back and forth between the right and left in their now serialized fiscal standoff, we are beginning to see increased activity in areas of the brain in charge of thinking twice about willingly suspending disbelief.

“Regardless of political orientation, subjects are suddenly having neurological responses to negotiations over such issues as the debt ceiling that are all but indistinguishable from those associated with watching clips of a World Wrestling Federation fight or watching jousts with balsa wood lances at a Renaissance Fair.

“Only a couple months ago clips of all the fiscal talking in Washington were lighting up areas in our subjects’ brains associated with processing episodes of Jersey Shore. Now you’d be hard pressed to tell whether the raw data was showing you a response to another Boehner and Obama get-together or to the smelling of a rat.

“I think what the Boehners and Obamas and the McConnells and Pelosis and Reids need to understand is that the American people are only a couple levels of skepticism away from getting a good, clean peek over the curtain hiding all the bogus coordinated pulling of levers and turning of knobs and flipping of switches and toggles posing as two-party governance.”

According to Dr. Amin, though, his study doesn’t hold only bad news for the nation’s elected officials.

Apparently the American people really really want to keep holding on to whatever shred is left of their ever diminishing belief that both sets of their ostensible leaders are not wholly in the thrall of the corporate lords.

America’s elected officials can also take heart in the fact that while it might have become almost unavoidably obvious that they are not concerning themselves much with the economic well-being of most their constituents, at least the antics they are pulling in Washington to hide this fact are offering lively entertainment to distract everyone from the economic hardships their antics are protracting.

“But for all this time America’s leaders still probably have to play with,” said Dr. Amin, “if I were them I wouldn’t wait too long before manufacturing an internal deadline for arriving at the place their corporate lords want them to go when theyr’e done with this increasingly dangerous play-acting like we’re not all going there.”