If you write fiction for a living you still need to know the difference in that fiction and the real world around you.

Thinking yourself to be James Bond, for example, can only lead to harm and disappointment…and probably not to beautiful women fawning all over you if you are male. You see, that was the fiction, not the fact.

The fact is you still have a mirror and you are no more perfect than before you wrote your description on page 5.

But in politics reading fiction as fact is an expensive and often foolish enterprise. Consider the Republican posturing on the debt ceiling.

No one likes raising the national debt. That is why, traditionally, the party of the President bears the burden of providing most of the votes to authorize the higher debt ceiling.

But the opposition party, knowing that the debt ceiling is serious business, also provides the votes required for passage.

And while it is popular to blame the party in power for the terrible spending excesses, the adults in the room are well aware that the debt is shared by everyone in the room.

Currently, for example, the debt ceiling has topped out not only because of the Obama tax cuts of 2009 and 2011, or the Infrastructure investments, or even the funds transferred to states to keep their police, firefighters and teachers during the Great Recession. The other contributors are the ongoing two wars and the continuing costs of Medicare Part D and the Bush tax cuts renewed by Obama and the Republicans last winter. The fingerprints of the guilty cross all party lines.

But the Republicans are like the binge and purge drinkers, who spend insanely in power, then forget what they did the morning, or election, after.

And like the drinker with the lost memories, Republicans have forgotten that they wanted “everything” on the table in debt and deficit discussions.

Now it is apparent that, for them, nothing is on the table but the non-sensical Ryan budget that charges only the middle class and the poor with balancing the budget.

The rich? Impossible for them to contribute…in fact Republicans want to lower their terrible tax burden of 18 percent, lower than all working Americans.

And the uber rich? Impossible for hedge fund managers who earn as much as $100 million in a year to pay more than capital gains taxes at 15 percent.

Corporations? Republicans call it a tax increase to end their suckling at the taxpayer teat.

Indeed, we taxpayers must give Big Oil $40 billion in tax benefits over the next decade. And we must leave the tax code in place that allows General Electric to make billions annually and pay no taxes at all. We must pay mega farmers or they won’t farm…just as we must pay huge corporations for ethanol subsidies.

Could the defense department pay with some cuts in spending? Again, Republicans say NO, impossible.

This in spite of the fact that the two wars are both winding down and the defense budget has nearly doubled over the last decade.

That defense is rife with overruns and corruption matters not to Republicans, let the middle class pay for the debt.

No, Republicans prefer their fictions over these facts. Tax cuts for the rich would kill jobs…though they have the lowest taxes in 60 years and have created no jobs.

Corporations will not create jobs if we tax them, although America’s international corporations have not created American jobs since the 1980s.

The facts are Republicans are blackmailing America by promising to destroy its economy if the middle class won’t give up their health care and Social Security while the rich pay fewer taxes and the nation throws money at corporations who grow their business in anyplace other than America.

You can’t make up this stuff.

Jim Crawford is retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.