The Democrat presidential nominee in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, said about the ethical standards of the Reagan Administration, “There’s an old Greek saying … the fish rots from the head first. It starts at the top.”  Dukakis went on to say that scandal and misconduct had become “almost an epidemic.  It’s the guy at the top who has to be held accountable.”

However, the ethical standards of the Reagan Administration were pristine compared to the cesspool of ethics scandals and the rampant lawlessness of the current Democrat administration.  Dukakis could have been describing the current occupant of the White House as the number of major presidential scandals continues to accelerate under Barack Obama.

As the American people are now finding out  --   little thanks to the “see no evil” mainstream news media  --  because of the president’s frequent attacks on his political opposition, his underlings, including apparently all the way up to his chief of staff, have been shading the truth; lying to the American people and to the news media, and are committing crimes in the name of their president.

During Easter Sunday, many millions of viewers who watched the History Channel’s record-breaking hit television series, “The Bible”  saw the conclusion to the series: the story of Jesus and his betrayal by one of his 12 disciples:  Judas. 

We have recently seen modern day “Judases” in the Republican Party who have forsaken their principles for 30 pieces of silver, or in this case for 3 years of 100% payments from ObamaCare’s socialized medicine scheme in return for the governors’ agreement to greatly expand an already-broken Medicaid system in their states; a system which is one of the most poorly-run health care systems in the entire world.

During the 2009-2010 congressional health care reform debate about the president’s signature law, ObamaCare  --  passed without a single Republican Senator or a single Republican Representative voting for it  --  Sarah Palin issued a “statement on the current health care debate” which warned about ObamaCare’s “death panels.”

Palin wrote, on August 7, 2009, seven months before Obama’s socialized medicine scheme was signed into law:  “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel”’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “’level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

While watching his fellow Yankees, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, hit homeruns, the incomparable Yogi Berra uttered the famous phrase:  “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 

In the now infamous and so-called Y2K “crisis” before the turn of the millennium on January 1, 2000, there were dire warnings for months in advance about mass computer and system shut-downs and countless disruptions of services all over the world.  It did not happen. 

Never before has an American president played the American people for fools such as Barack Obama has done this year with his apocalyptic warnings about what is going to happen tomorrow when the paltry “sequestration” spending cuts hit the federal government; a cut of little over 2% ($44 billion in actual outlays) out of a gargantuan fiscal year budget of over $3.5 trillion. 

The following are a few of the consequences, according to Obama and his liberal acolytes, that will occur if the scheduled cuts resulting from Obama’s own sequestration scheme  --  which he and his new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew hatched during the summer of 2011  --  go through tomorrow:

Canadian-born Ted Cruz, freshman Republican senator from Texas, can never be president of the United States.  On the other hand, he can be Senate Majority Leader. 

Senator Cruz seems to be taking the opposite path to Republican congressional leadership than has his fellow Hispanic, fellow Reaganite, and fellow Tea Party hero, Senator Marco Rubio, R-FL.  The latter senator sat on the back benches in the Senate chamber for most of his first two years in the Senate beginning on January 2011 until stepping into the spotlight.  And what a spotlight that has been, including giving the response last week to the president’s state of the union speech.

Barack Obama has put up the scariest group of 2^nd term nominees for his major cabinet posts since Franklin Roosevelt.  One of Obama’s extreme left-wing nominations includes his Secretary of State nominee, John Kerry, who many of us Vietnam War veterans believe is a traitor to those of us who served; most especially after his treasonous remarks disparaging war veterans during a wartime congressional hearing.

John Kerry said this during an anti-war congressional hearing on April 22, 1971 after he came back from Vietnam:  "They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

On Wednesday, the House passed the “No Budget, No Pay Bill” which will temporarily suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until May 19th. Included in the measure is a provision that would withhold congressional pay after April 15th and extend until Congress passes a budget. During a press conference, in the middle of the House vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate would take up the House measure “as is,” and the president is expected to sign it.

The Hill reports 33 Republicans voted against it because it didn’t include any spending cuts, but 86 Democrats voted for it with the final vote being 285-144.

Since November’s election, which gave the Democrats the White House and the Senate and the Republicans the House of Representatives, there have been two major pieces of legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives; the first, a big spending and taxing bill, and the second, a big spending bailout bill.  Both times, the Republican-controlled House passed the bills with a very small number of Republicans voting for them. The Republican leaders could have, and should have, refused to bring these bills to the House floor for a vote. In the first of these two big spending bills, the Republican-controlled House also passed the biggest tax increase in some 20 years; Barack Obama’s whopping $620 BILLION tax increase legislation.

When the Tea Party and conservative movements gave control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2010 with a huge pick-up of 63 new seats,   --  after the GOP had lost majority control in 2006 because of their prolific spending  --  and control of the House again with a large majority last November, there was no way conservatives believed that the Republican Party would repay them with two gargantuan back-to-back spending bills. 

Republicans should let Barack Obama jump off the “fiscal cliff” if he wants, but they can also do something productive for the American taxpayers.  That is why the American people gave them huge majorities in the House of Representatives in both the 112th Congress in 2010 and in the 113th Congress in last month’s election.  The Republicans in the House of Representatives should pass a permanent extension of President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, leave town and have a Merry Christmas.

Newt Gingrich was quoted in a “NewsMax.TV” article on Saturday that he is almost afraid that agreement will be reached to avoid the country from going over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” because “the agreement will be ‘a really bad deal.’”  Remembering past deals such as the one President Ronald Reagan said was one of his worst decisions  --  i.e. Reagan said he would deliver $1 dollar in tax increases for every $3 of federal spending cuts offered by then-Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill  --  Speaker Gingrich said, “I don’t see any evidence that the president is prepared to deliver liberal Democrats in the Senate for any kind of spending cuts that matter.” 

The 1994 election provides a beacon of hope for Republicans in Congress.  Voters in the historical mid-term election gave control of the United States House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.  The last time the Republicans gained control of the House was when Dwight David Eisenhower won his overwhelming victory over Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

Senate Republicans also regained control of the Senate from 1953 to 1955, just as the Republicans in the House did.  While House Republicans were in the political wilderness for the next 40 years, President Ronald Reagan’s two landslides in 1980 and 1984 gave Republicans control of the Senate for six years.

The reason the U.S. Congress was controlled by the Democrats for most of the 40 years prior to the 1994 election can best be personified by the long-time minority  --  emphasis on minority  --  leader, Congressman Bob Michel, a very kind and genial man, but a highly ineffective leader.  Congressman Michel was perfectly content to accept crumbs from the Democrat spending feast.  If the Democrats promised a cut of $1 dollar in federal spending for every $1 tax increase  --  a highly unlikely proposal since they normally wanted more tax increases --  you can bet the spending cuts would not materialize following the tax increases because of decades of weak Republican leadership.