Super committee: Our gang (dark) comedy

LET'S PAUSE FOR a moment to consider the newly created Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. It is the sort of title that bureaucracies love to name in a way to guarantee that nobody really understands what it is intended to do. In possible deference to the committee members' family and friends, the name has been reduced to "super committee", which is just as meaningless but more readily accessible to anybody who foolishly tries to bring it up in casual conversation.

But there is nothing super about the 12-member bipartisan panel that was created to forestall the Republican-driven track to default. At least until November. By then the six Democrats and six Republicans must work out a bloodless compromise to find upward of $1.5 trillion in budget cuts over the next 10 years. Make me laugh.

Compromise? Need I remind you that all of the panel's half-dozen Republicans, including Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, have already pledged not to raise taxes. They are the servile lemmings of a fellow that nobody has ever voted for- a rigid anti-tax carnivore with a name right out of a Dickensian novel, Grover Norquist. He is a Beltway operative with mystical powers over pols whose courage is adrift.

It's not a reassuring narrative. Indeed, it's a joke.

Portman works well with Democrats?

Do you have as much trouble trying to understand today's political reports as I do? For example, I stumbled on this in the New York Times' report on the new members of the destined-to-be- deadlocked (@$#&#) super committee - a feel-good initiative with the impossible mission of a bipartisan attack on the Federal deficit.

In reference to Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman's appointment, the Times reported: "Mr. Portman, a House member from 1993 to 2005 , was White House budget director under President George W. Bush. Throughout his time in Congress, he has worked well with Democrats even as he voted consistently with the other Republicans." (emphasis added.)

Now I humbly ask the deep thinkers: How can you work well with the other party by consistently voting against it? Is that the same as offering the other side a mop after you've spilled the milk all over the kitchen floor. But maybe there will be a revealing side of his presence on the panel.. Would it be rude to again note that one reason we have this economic mess is that he was Bush's budget director when the deficit climbed to over $10 trillion?