Government by tantrum

“Waaaaa! You’re not playing fair!”

“Waaaaa! You’re going to bankrupt America!”

“Waaaaa! You guys started it!”

The crybabies in Washington are at it again.

Arguing, name-calling and throwing heated rhetoric around like “extortion” and “blow the whole thing up,” our so-called leaders are acting like out-of-control little kids in a sandbox.

They haven’t begun hitting each other over the head with chairs or waving weapons around on the Senate floor, but give them time.

It’s government by tantrum again. It’s government by threat and scare tactic and selective shutdown of federal programs.

It’s government by and for the people in government, instead of government by and for the people who elected them.

It’s the petty, partisan kind of government we’ve been getting for too long and the kind we can’t afford and don’t deserve.

And it’s time for the bums in Congress and the president to quit trying to score political points over the debt ceiling, and start acting like responsible adults.

The House and the Senate need to get their legislative acts together.

They need to pass the 13 appropriations bills like they’re supposed to, negotiate their differences in conference committees and then do the job they were elected to do — pass the darn legislation.

We all know Washington is not going to let the U.S. government default on Oct. 17, so let’s cut with the fear mongering and rhetoric.

All it does is make the markets fearful. It makes investors fearful. It makes retired people fearful.

By delaying and dithering and crybabying, our so-called leaders in Washington have made everyone in America nervous — and angry.

One reason the D.C. crowd can’t lead is because they’re so politically spineless. They can’t decide how to vote on anything important without reading a poll. I bet they don’t pick a tie to wear until they’ve consulted Gallup.

But leadership is not looking at polls. Leadership is leading.

My father was a leader. He went through six government shutdowns under Tip O’Neill. But Ronald Reagan led, and we came through the 1980s with a growing economy that benefitted all Americans.

We need leaders in Washington. We don’t need whiners. We don’t need fear-mongers.

We don’t need poll-watchers and wimps who can’t make a principled vote on issues of national importance like the debt ceiling, the budget or Obamacare.

If no one has the courage to stand up and lead in Washington, maybe we should default.

Maybe we need to show the rest of the world that America has finally hit bottom.

Maybe we should admit that we’ve finally become Europe or Greece. That we’ve finally become the United States of California.

All because we lack leadership.

As far as I can tell, most of the people in the United States are completely fed up with all the B.S. in D.C.

I think they’d agree with me that starting today the message from all of us to our federal politicians should be, “Get the job done or resign — all of you.”

©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press).