Scarborough Fair?

AN EDITED VERSION OF THIS PIECE APPEARS IN LETTERS TO THE EDITOR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON MARCH 5, 2013

("Singing the Sequester Soap Opera")

There is almost a palpable sense of smugness and self-satisfaction in the words of Mr. Scarborough, as he ridicules the administration and its alleged hyperbole.

It is his blatant disregard for the real impact on real lives that is so appalling. President Obama has attempted to give a face to an abstraction, speaking of the young children not in the Head Start program, to the federal worker with unwanted and unpaid furlough, to the long term unemployed who will see benefits slashed. Mr.Scarborough sees only numbers on a page.

This is not armageddon, not the apocalypse, not Pearl Harbor. But I wonder how Mr. Scarborough would have reacted had these monies come from the revenue side of the equation by removing irrational and unnecessary tax benefits to hedge fund managers and subsidies to oil industry giants. When those who can most afford are the targets, would he have been so cavalier in his words? Would he have pointed out that those people's lives, these businesses, would remain effectively unchanged and that our economy and our people would suffer so much less of an impact than by choosing the road now taken?

What Mr. Scarborough sees as de minimis feels to me like an extension of Mr. Romney and his comments of the 47%, dripping with contempt and disregard for the welfare of so many. This country is far more than a mathematical equation.