Mitch McConnell (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Mitch McConnell (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

“This is what passes for governance among Democrats these days: put the American people up against a wall, pick their pockets, and hope that in the midst of the scuffle they blame it—and the recession that would follow—on Republicans,” McConnell said.

This is rich, in an unbelievable can-he-really-be-that-hypocritical kind of way. Here's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Democratic threats to let the Bush tax cuts expire and the automatic spending cuts kick in at the end of the year:Gosh, that sounds awfully familiar. How many times have Republicans taken the nation's economy hostage in hopes of wrecking it and President Obama's hopes of reelection? That was on extending unemployment benefits, on giving middle-class taxpayers a bit of a break with the payroll tax holiday, on the things that actually put a little bit of extra money into the pockets of everyday Americans.

That's not all, though. McConnell also says:



“I don’t think playing Russian roulette with the economy is a smart thing to do,” the Kentuckian said Monday night on “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” “We need to be responsible here. Everybody knows what we need to do at the end of the year. We need not to raise anybody’s taxes, particularly we do not want to raise taxes on almost a million of our most important and effective small businesses.”

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this—it's a hostage that's worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.

Let's take a short trip back in time, to when Republicans were ready to let the country go into default, and McConnell's strategy then Remember what happened when they were holding the debt ceiling hostage for ransom? How the U.S. credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history? That was worth ransoming for McConnell. But talking about letting tax rates revert to the levels they were at during the Clinton boom years is "Russian roulette."

McConnell sure has made it clear where his loyalties lie.