The House GOP is in critical condition after a self-inflicted gun injury.
Unless you are living in a cave on Mars, you know what happened in Washington tonight.
The House Republicans supported their leader
Actually, the second government shutdown in U.S. history.
The Teapublicans actually believe that they will pull this off by pointing the finger at Pres. Obama, Sen. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats.
Because Teapublicans are stupid enough to believe that the majority of Americans are as stupid as they are.
They are in for a rude awakening.
The House Republicans tried this move 17 years ago, under Speaker Newt Gingrich. It did not end well for Gingrich or the Republican party. So much so, that today, even Gingrich thinks that the current shutdown is a monumentally stupid move.
But, here it is.
As the kids say today...
"So, that happened."
Far too many House republicans have become so worried about keeping their jobs that the handful of fringe, far-right, tea-bagging, loonies, have terrorized them into complacent cooperation.
The "TEA Party," aside from highjacking the name of an actual, patriotic movement, without understanding actual history, equally, cluelessly, highjacked an early American, revolutionary war symbol.
Tonight, the new flag of the Republican party should be this...
I know.
The snake eating it's own tail has some sort of historical, philosophical significance regarding infinity and eternity and what-not.
But, if the baggers can highjack a symbol, so can I.
The snake is fucking eating itself alive.
And I can think of no better symbol for the current state of The GOP.
I hate the cliché about "drinking the Kool-Aid™. I believe that it disrespects the surviving families and friends of the victims of the Jonestown Massacre.
And, it's trite.
But, Ted Cruz and his ilk are really nothing more than political, evangelical, cult leading Jim Joneses.
I kind of like "They have drunk the TEA." That works for me.
But, maybe even better...
Before Jonestown.
Before the TEA Party.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote a play called, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June."
The Blog knows a lot about this play, because, oh so many years ago, he played the lead, Harold Ryan, in a production of the play.
And in this play, Vonnegut via Harold Ryan, talks about drinking "the blue soup."
"What kind of a country has this become?" asks Harold Ryan, a hunter and soldier who was lost in the Amazon for seven years. "America's days of greatness are over. It has drunk the blue soup."Harold's a vulgar, violent asshole, bent on destruction, having killed 103 people for the hell of it. He embodies the extremes of America - murderous rage and vile complacency. So of course, in Vonnegut's world, he's dead-on.
He explains to his wife, Penelope, that it's "An Indian narcotic we were forced to drink. It put us in a haze--a honey-colored haze which was lavender around the edge. We laughed, we sang, we snoozed. When a bird called, we answered back. Every living thing was our brother or our sister, we thought...All the time we were drinking more blue soup, more blue soup! Never stopped drinking blue soup. Blue soup all the time. We'd go out after food in that honey-colored haze, and everything that was edible had a penumbra of lavender."
When Penelope tells Harold that it "Sounds quite beautiful," he explodes, "Beautiful, you say? It wasn't life, it wasn't death--it wasn't anything! Beautiful? Seven years gone--(snapping his fingers) like that, like that! Seven years of silliness and random dreams! Seven years of nothingness, when there could have been so much!"
"Like what?" Penelope asks.
Harold responds, "Action! Interaction! Give and take! Challenge and response!"
Vonnegut was right, too, of course. We are lost in our haze of blue soup, electronically-mediated, information-controlled, politcally-spun honey-colored penumbrae.
In the play, the liberal, pacifist, Vonnegut satirized the right-wing war hawks when he wrote Harold's rant.
But, The Blog thinks that, from today's perspective, it is an apt description of the low information, right-wing, Fox "News" TEA party.
They have truly, drunk the blue soup.
You may want to fact check your number of government shutdowns. A quick wiki check has 17 since 1976. There were a few during Reagan's terms. At lest 1for Carter.
ReplyDeleteAh! Mr. or Ms. Unknown, you went and caught The Curmudgeon being all hyperbolic. But, that's okay. Call out anyone and everyone on misinformation. Even me! If my post inspired you to do some actual homework, well that makes my day!
DeleteYou get an A- for effort.
If you had gone a little deeper than a "quick wiki check," you would have noticed that 15 of those 17 shutdowns were brief, logistical, governmental hiccups that bore little resemblance to the Gingrich hissy fit, and weren't even from the same planet as last night's, (dare I say it?) seditious activity by the House GOP.
So, as a film director that I used to work for liked to say...
"Good! But, no."