Blog Heap of Links for the day 18 August 2011

Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have had good, inspiring, on-target things to say about the US fiscal crisis. Michelle Bachmann has had good things to say. John Bolton had an important piece making the case that national security is inextricably linked with fiscal security, a much-needed point in the context of the recent debate. But Sarah Palin came through today with a Facebook post that strikes the right tone and is at once simple, direct, and comprehensive. It doesn't rail at past mistakes, nor does it come across as a raised-voice, you've-got-to-get-this-people communication. Palin takes it for granted — with refreshing common sense — that we are in a crisis, its features are obvious, and the task now is to deal with it, not continue to argue whether it's really a crisis or how big it is or whose name we can pin on it.

Blaming the Tea Party for our credit downgrade is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for burning Rome. Tea Party Americans weren't the ones "fiddling" while our country's fiscal house was going up in smoke. In fact, we commonsense fiscal conservatives were the ones grabbing for the extinguishers while politically correct politicians and their cronies buried their heads in what soon became this bonfire.