I thought the skit portrayed the entire ethos and psychological denial of the Republican leadership quite nicely. I suspect a hidden camera observing such a meeting wouldn't reveal much that was different.

Instead of going over the top with this skit, I suspect the SNL crew were going for accuracy (the awkward pauses, for instance just help us realize how slow-witted these people really are). After all, how could you parody people like this except to let them speak for themselves? The joke of this skit is not ON them... the joke IS them.

These people and their supporters are so far out of touch with reality that the sky in their world has to be some virulent, sickly shade of green. I suspect the air in their parallel universe even smells a bit of sulfur.

The rest of us would feel as if we had walked into the twilight zone if we, too, drank the "koolaide" required to enter that world. Likely it would be so disorienting as to make us retch, but these Republican leaders still think "the people" are just waiting to be led out of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid wilderness back into that world because they see it as the days when glorious light of Bushco and Rubaugh shown most brightly.

After they are, in the main, retired by the next election, they will continue to pine for the glory years when Bush was in the White House and, from their perspective, all was right with the world. Meanwhile, the whole universe will go merrily on without them. As their lives in this world come to an end, they're likely to discover that the sky in the place they next find themselves is not the color they expected.

It would be nice if those who claim that tax increases will cause people to decide not to make more money would do a bit of research on human motivation, or even bother to compare tax rates, especially on those earning the most, with national prosperity over the past 60 years.

For the vast majority of people, money is NOT their principle motivation for work.

Once folks who are emotionally/psychologically healthy get beyond meeting their basic needs and having enough discretionary income for a bit of fun and/or a nice toy or two, the nature of the work environment itself, the people they work with, what kind of person their boss is and the nature of the work they do all rank far higher in whether or not they feel motivated to do their best work than how much money they're making.

There is one class of people who are motivated primarily by money, however, and those have tended to be the folks who've worked in the boiler rooms of Wall Street where money was the only reward and making money for the company (by hook or by crook) was the only way of gaining any reward. Being a decent human being has often gotten in the way of working under such conditions.

Furthermore, Wall Street has pressured every corporation in America to move in the same direction and pushed all the large national banks to alter their home mortgage and credit card policies to do the same. In their effort to make ever more money, our biggest financial institutions long ago gave up personally vetting loan applicants and the simple math of compound interest we all grew up with in favor of gambling on risks and rewards. They were so blinded by their desire for more money that no risk seemed too great if the rewards promised were high enough.

Restructuring our economy so that it has, more and more created a nation that operates of the money, by the money, and for the money, has gotten us to where we are today.

For those of us who are healthy enough to look beyond money and see what's really been going on, it's well beyond time for those who can only see money to take a back seat while we who have a broader perspective begin to repair the damage the "money" people can't even comprehend they've caused.