Prairie fire and cowpies make campfire politics

What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?  Who knows.  The more pertinent question for this past week: What happens when a prairie fire hits a pile of cowpies?

Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have been tweaking their rhetoric for Iowan ears.  Responding to Romney’s accusation that he’s tended over a “prairie fire of debt,” Obama has described his opponent’s criticism as a “cowpie of distortions.”  Our President continues to debase the discussion with a vulgar allusion to a steaming pile.

Meanwhile, the White House and the Left have tried to play off of the ill logic of Rex Nutting, who contended earlier this week that Obama has grown Federal deficits at the lowest rate since the Eisenhower administration.  Many observers have debunked this idea.  James Taranto put it well when he noted that Obama has treated Bush’s one year, necessary TARP swell as a baseline for subsequent years’ Federal budgets.

It’s as if you, the head of a household, assented to spending $10,000 to repair a sudden, gaping hole in the roof one year, but decided to keep spending that same extra amount for each of the three following years.  And this spending is not on other emergencies, but pet projects.  All the while, you claim to be a fiscal hawk because your spending hasn’t grown significantly since the initial boost that you approved when you first came in.

So Romney’s prairie fire claim isn’t so . . . smelly after all.  What we’re left with is a challenger with a base itching–on fire, in fact–to vote out an incumbent whose campaign and allies never seem to be in short supply of well, cowpies.  At least you can dry them out and use them for fuel.