I’d like to thank Clancy Hughes for sharing with us his look around the corner in last week’s paper. The future he had us peer into, if we should go off the fiscal cliff, was, to say the least, disturbing, but essential to view. What a moment as we slip into the Christmas season with politicians playing this horrible game of chicken with our economic and political future. 

At this point, indeed, running room is getting shorter and shorter as Jan. 1 looms. But what’s amazing is that the pending doom of Jan. 1 is all but a state of mind we could will away tomorrow if we wanted to. Alas, as Pogo said, “we’ve met the enemy and it’s us,” particularly the Republican Party part of us.

For never would I have believed I’d have been around to see the party of Lincoln take hostage the country’s very well-being as today’s politically mutated Republican Party into the Banana Republican Party has, in trying to foist their mutant absolute will on economic matters on us — not, in fact, too dissimilar, in an incredibly weird and very ironic way, to the brutish, totalitarian ways in which international commies once operated. To watch them attempt to impose their iron will, in the face of the people’s will, as was manifestly expressed in our recent election and jeopardize not only our economic recovery, but bend our system of governance completely out of shape by threat of calamity, is heart wrenching — completely heart wrenching to watch.

Whatever happened to the notion of the loyal opposition? Without it our system of governance is ungovernable. We are sunk.

To think, Clancy, that Banana Republicans have the temerity to even up the ante by adding another demented dimension to this, is just jaw dropping. It makes me as aghast as I’ve ever been to watch Banana Republicans, in the attempt to firmly hold hostage our country’s well-being, jeopardize the full faith and credit of the nation by threatening to welsh on our creditors by not raising the debt ceiling at the end of February. They rather extort than compromise over their version of domestic spending cuts. We all should remember the last time, when the Banana Republican Party threatened to renege on our creditors, how the credit rating agencies downgraded us from a triple A to a double A rating. In additional interest payments the Banana Republicans’ stunt cost us $18 billion. And remember how the stock market plummeted?

But what the heck, it was only $18 billion — peanuts, huh? — and the stock market rebounded. No sweat.

Such monkey business on the part of the Banana Republicans could really explode our debt into the realm of crushing if markets become convinced we’ve become irrevocably dysfunctional as a government, hence, untrustworthy. Clancy, let interest rates on our debt go up even a little and see where we’ll be left: in big-big trouble that’s where.

Anymore, looking how we are now poised to go off the cliff, it shouldn’t be too hard to convince the rest of the world of our being irrevocably dysfunctional — now, should it?  Anymore, just what are these reckless politicians — nihilists? What the Banana Republican Party is, for sure, is the Grinch that stole the 2012 Christmas for so many good, hard-working Americans, not knowing what to expect next year.

Let us all hope and pray they come to their senses by the end of the week. Indeed, let’s pray hard for our country. “These are times that try men’s souls.”

Tim O’Leary is a longtime Homer resident and political observer.