It is difficult to recall a time when Democrats’ chief arguments against a Republican proposal have reached such a level of absurdity as we saw this week during debate on House Speaker John Boehner’s debt ceiling plan. From both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, Democrats marshaled a series of disingenuous arguments in their attempts to avoid admitting that they simply refuse to go along with any genuine effort to bring federal spending under control. Take the White House, where spokesman Jay Carney accused House Republicans of acting “incredibly juvenile” by displaying the same level of party loyalty seen in the unanimous declaration of the 53 Senate Democrats to oppose the Boehner plan. Carney then made the fantastical claim that House Republicans are determined to ruin Christmas because the Boehner plan “would almost certainly require almost all of us to go through this again at the end of the year, the most important economic season of the country.” Carney apparently forgot that neither his boss in the Oval Office nor congressional Democrats cared a fig about ruining Christmas Eve when they forced a congressional vote on Obamacare in 2009.

Then Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, plunged into paranoid delusions over the GOP. “This is not leadership,” she said, according to Politico. “This is almost like dictatorship. I know they want to force the outcome that … their extremists would like to impose,” she said. Dictatorship? Really? If the hyperexcitable DNC chairwoman wants a concrete demonstration of what a dictatorship would look like, she should consult Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who thinks President Obama should simply raise the debt ceiling by issuing a Hugo Chavez-like decree.