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“I’m not ready to make nice,” to use a phrase from an old Dixie Chicks song. Instead, it’s time to take the gloves off.

Our nation now stands at economic DEFCON 2. It is likely that at midnight we will hit DEFCON 1. At that point the president will have to do anything and everything in his power to defend the economic and credit worthiness of our country, everything except one thing. He cannot negotiate with terrorists. That is our long standing policy as a nation. In this instance the terrorists are domestic and American. Tea Party Republicans are economic terrorists who are threatening to bring down our nation’s economy, inflicting untold pain and suffering on ordinary people, unless they get their way.

These are not harsh words undeserved by them and unbecoming of me. The word “terrorism” means “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.” Republican radicals are doing just that. They are trying to terrorize President Obama with economic threats as a way to coerce him into agreeing to their demands. If a group of political terrorists made a similar kind of threat, the president would have to use whatever military might available to bring them down. President Obama cannot do that to these economic Republican terrorists, but he can and should seek to bring every ounce of political power he has down on their heads.

What is happening is stunning in its childishness. These people are not loyal Americans. They are traitors to their country and its form of government. This is not politics as usual. This is an unprecedented tyranny of the minority that is seeking to alter the way the Constitution says our government should function. Because they tried 41 times to defund the Affordable Care Act through legislative means and got nowhere (which is the way the system works), they have now decided to bring the government down. They are lying when they say they don’t want to shut the government down. Every reason they have given for not funding the ACA has been shown time and again to be untrue and in some instances a deliberate distortion of the facts. At this point nothing they say can be believed.

What makes their lying worse is the sheer hypocrisy of what they are doing. These same people voted to cut Food Stamps by $40 billion while preserving that part of the Farm Bill that pays them into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm subsidies. No wonder they want to defund the ACA while being covered themselves by the best insurance available that is paid for by the government. That takes brass.

How anyone can cast a vote for these people is ultimately what is most baffling. If I were a Republican voter I would be ashamed of what these members of my party are doing. Just as I would vote against the two Democrats who also voted to defund the ACA if I lived in their district, Republican voters should refuse to support these Republican extremists. To throw them out of office may be the only way to save our form of government. They have proven that they have no interest in the government functioning. They should be replaced by a different kind of conservative who does.