Who gave these people the keys to the country?

I have a good friend who advised me some time ago that if you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. Eventually what you’re supposed to do will show itself to you. I’ve tried to follow this strategy and it’s actually worked pretty well for me.

But my life is pretty simple. And my problems are equally simple. So me doing nothing usually has little downside. It’s not like the fate of the country is in my hands.

Unfortunately, it would seem that the people that are running the country have gotten the same advice. If they don’t know what to do, they do nothing.

It’s considerably more problematic than my doing nothing.

Case in point: Any number of government shutdowns and budget battles. The government has taken doing nothing to a whole new level. Their practice of procrastination could win Olympic medals.

We jumped over the fiscal cliff and now we’re being sequestered, apparently.

I’ve only been familiar with the term “sequester” as part of court cases until just recently. It usually means to keep a jury holed up in a hotel until they reach a verdict. Maybe that’s what we should do with Congress — lock them up in a room until they come up with a solution to current budget crisis.

The current budget crisis, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is a series of wide-ranging across-the-board budget cuts designed to be unpalatable to both parties. They focus on defense spending and domestic spending.

As is usual, the GOP is fine with the domestic spending cuts but wants the military cuts restored. And the Democrats want the domestic spending restored but isn’t as concerned about the military cuts. Democrats have suggested tax increases to offset the impending cuts. Republicans say no new taxes.

All this happens Friday unless someone does something to fix it. But all signs point to Congress following my friend’s advice of just doing nothing. Which, again, is fine for me. But not so fine for those with the keys to the country.

Of course, we’re the one’s who put them there.

See, you’d think that when choosing people to represent us in Washington, we’d pick the smartest people with the best ideas. But you’d be wrong. First of all, those who vote like to go with people who think like them as opposed to people who just think. Second, those who vote are frequently outnumbered by those who didn’t know what to do so they didn’t do anything.

Long story short: Pogo was right. We are our own worst enemies.

So as Friday draws near and nothing of any consequence is done in Washington, remember that we could have elected smarter people. But we chose not to.

Maybe we should all be sequestered before the next election.

Scott Leffler frequently does nothing. It’s for the best. But when he does anything mildly important, he tweets about it @scottleffler.

Crisis mode is the new black

It seems to me like more and more we’re not normal unless we’re in the midst of a crisis.

I don’t know if it’s the effect of American Idol or it we were all raised on WWF or what, but more and more it seems like anything non-life-threatening is just boring to us.

First is was the end of the world prediction. Then the next one. Then the Mayan one. Then the Fiscal Cliff. And now we’re worried about the debt ceiling. Again.

Government shutdowns are the new norm and the possibility that we might know where our next meal or paycheck is coming from is just so passe. If we’re not living on the edge these days, it’s like we’re not living.

From the crisis that was the election to the economic crisis that followed in the months after, we’re glued to our TVs and newspapers wondering what horrible tragedy may meet us next.

I can’t help but wonder why. What is it we get out of it? Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I have a deluded view of the world and I’m the only one intrigued by these things.

In fact, there are people all around the world — even here in the US of A — that not only don’t know what the Fiscal Cliff is all about, they probably have no clue who won the American election. I either pity them or am jealous, I’m not sure which.

The latest grand plan, although I’m not sure whose plan it is, is to mint a trillion dollar coin to deal with the impending debt ceiling doom. A trillion. That’s a 1 with 12 zeros after it. It looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000.

If you worked for the next 70 years, you could easily save up a trillion dollars. Assuming of course, you didn’t eat … and you made $274.7 million a month. And some change.

To be completely honest with you, my life is kind of boring. I wake up. I eat. I putz around. I go to work. I come home. I putz around. I sleep. I repeat. On weekends, it’s a little more exciting because I actually get to spend time with my kids. And we watch movies where things blow up.

But movies where things blow up are not nearly as compelling as the possibility that the fabric of society completely unravels. Which is where we’ve constantly been for the past few years.

I mean, really. Your life pales in comparison to the impending doom predicted by some Mayan thousands of years ago who created a calendar which allegedly foretold the end of the world, right?

So we take the latest crisis and we hang on in hopes that it will be more exciting than the last crisis, which — let’s be honest — was a little ho hum, right?

Maybe some day we’ll go back to just living our lives. Going to work. Sleeping. And watching Bourne movies with the kids.

Until then, bring out the trillion dollar coin.

Scott Leffler majored in sarcasm in college. He had a double minor in apathy and lunch. Feel free to make a futile effort of following his twisted logic on Twitter @scottleffler.

GOP will have to pick a side and go with it

It doesn’t seem to matter what you do in life, you’ll always second guess yourself. Maybe you should have stuck with something longer. Or quit something earlier. Maybe you should have taken that job at that place. Or gone to graduate school.

Looking back on life, it’s usually easy to see how you got where you are. It has been a straight line, after all. Even if it didn’t seem it at the time. But when you reached those forks in the road, you had to pick a direction. And you wonder if you picked correctly.

The Republican Party now finds itself at just such a fork.

The “conservative” or “tea party” wing of the party believes that they lost the presidential election because their candidate, Mitt Romney, wasn’t conservative enough. This, they feel, caused “the base” to be reluctant to turn out to vote, which, in turn hurt other Republican candidates and causes.

The more moderate (or liberal, if you will) side of the Republican Party believes that it’s actually those uber-conservative ideals which hurt them in this election cycle. Many have said that they feel they have been painted with a very wide brush that makes them look as though they're uncompromising and hard to get along with.

So you have two sides of a political coin, if you will. And it’s currently in the air waiting to come down heads or tails.

My personal belief is that the tea party wing of the party overplayed their hand and got hurt because of it. When you give ultimatums as they have made a habit of doing, you have only two options: everything goes your way or nothing does. They had gotten used to getting what they wanted and have no idea how to handle the current situation where they may very well get nothing.

That would be all well and good if they learned that lesson. But they seem to feel — as evident from Grover Norquist’s appearance on “Meet the Press” this past weekend — that the problem wasn’t their unwillingness to budge. The problem was that they weren’t strong enough.

Norquist predicted that there will be a huge resurgence of the tea party in 2014 if the president takes us over “the fiscal cliff.” He’s calling for the GOP to stand firm and refuse to cave to the White House’s demands for tax increases as part of a budget compromise.

I’m not sure if Norquist is bluffing or if he really believes that, but I think the GOP has painted itself into a corner and missed the memo that the nation as a whole took a left turn at the last election.

Of course, only time will tell. And when we look back on it, it will all make sense. Hindsight is 20-20, of course.

Scott Leffler can not see the future. This column is intended as entertainment only. All rights reserved. And other legal mumbo jumbo. Call your doctor if you feel more columns are right for you. And be sure to follow Scott on Twitter @scottleffler — as long as your doctor says it’s OK.