If the next cup of tea you drink leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, there's a good reason: It's a hangover from the tea party they just had in Washington, D.C. It isn't the first tea party to leave historic after-effects on this country, but it may turn out to be just as important as the original, a frenzied act of property destruction that Thomas Jefferson himself called cowardly because the perpetrators pretended to be Indians. This time around they are pretending to be patriots. The outcome of this tea party will steer history down a course far different than the course charted back in Boston Harbor, however. It is a course aimed at disaster and disguised as a rescue by a minority of unyielding Tea Party Republicans who mistook their midterm elections as an absolute mandate to lower the nation's debt at all costs when it was actually an outcry of frustration against the corruption and cronyism in our dysfunctional capital. They charged into office waving the banner of their patron saint Ronald Reagan, who preached that government was the problem and not the solution, and with stubborn blindness were unable to see that they were making an even bigger problem out of our government.

It is a sure sign a country needs to change its course when ideology supersedes practicality. And ideology has taken over Washington with results that Americans, most of whom were not familiar with the debt ceiling before the Tea Party took them hostage over it, will suffer from for years. Every voter that sent these inflexible ideologists to Washington to represent them will feel the first credit downgrade in American history personally. Already the less than 1 percent initial interest hike that is expected from the downgrade that has occurred because of these impractical ideologists is projected to cost the United States $100 billion a year in new debt beyond the debt that the Tea Party charged into Washington to lower. The entire U.S. Department of Education budget last year was $30 billion less than that! In other words, the fiasco in D.C. has just added enough new debt next year to pay for one of the big programs contributing to the old debt. In other words, treasury holders like China will be getting additional billions annually that could have gone to our own children if our leaders hadn't played political games during these dire economic times. Ideology has superseded practicality.

The Democrats are not without blame and our president, who has yet to keep the promise of "spreading the wealth" that swept him into office, is certainly culpable, but most of the blame for the downgrade falls on the shoulders of the stubborn Republicans who thought they had found a way to force all of us into spending less. In pursuing this impractical method of implementing their ideological cause they were warned that merely prolonging the debate could erode the already weakening confidence of the world in our once proud country, but they ignored the warning and continued the stalemate in an effort to force the Democrats - who had already negotiated away even the practical expectation that tax breaks to the wealthy should end - to fold. And Americans saw firsthand during all the political posturing that it was more important to those involved to win the debate than to save the country.

Did any true patriot ever imagine the day would come when the commander of the armed forces of the United States would go into a war zone and tell his soldiers that he was not sure whether they would be paid that month because of the antics of their supposed leaders? Well, Admiral Mike Mullin did just that in Afghanistan, and it was a sad day for this country, and a sign of how far we have fallen - and not just in our credit rating.

The America those soldiers believe they are defending is a country where people pull together in tough times and put aside their ideological differences to do what is sensible when necessary for the good of all. But what they actually have is a country where making a point is more important than being able to make a living. It is a country in which the collective memory of its citizens slips into amnesia over a single emotional issue and forces them to vote for their own starvation simply because they refuse to eat food from the other party's kitchen. It is a country where Republicans can sell themselves as being a practical choice for working class people by pulling stunts like they just pulled in Washington where they railed against raising a debt ceiling that their own party has raised 49 times since 1960, as opposed to the 29 times the "liberal" Democrats raised it. It is a country that elected Tea Party representatives who resist the proposals of a president who, even with all the expensive attempts at stimulating the economy, has still managed to add to the national debt only about a third of what George Bush added. It is a country where entrenched idealists who care more for their causes than their constituents wave the flag and call themselves patriots and where people cast votes for them based on that ridiculous claim.

So enjoy your cup of tea, America. It is going to turn out to be an expensive drink. It's already hard to swallow.

Mike Ruskovich is a teacher who resides in Blanchard.