Don’t Cry For Me, John Boehner

"A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere, or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair. But no, You sent us Congress! Good God, Sir, was that fair?"
       - John Adams to God, 1776

 

It’s not just me, right?

It can’t be.

You feel it too, don’t you?

Sooner or later the extremists are going to start shooting hostages and chucking their bodies out the front door of the Capitol Building.

I expect to turn on the news and see the National Mall covered in police cars, flashing lights, and SWAT teams. With an FBI negotiator shouting through a bullhorn, “Okay, just come out with your hands up and nobody else has to get hurt!” And the Tea Party shouting back, “You’ll never take us alive, Copper!”

And then the shooting starts.*

About the only thing they haven’t done yet is demand a suitcase full of money in small unmarked bills and an airplane fueled and waiting at Reagan National.

Do you want to know just how ridiculous the GOP has become?

You don’t have to look any further than this:

Click on the image for a larger version.

That’s a screen capture from the Google News Aggregator for “Republican Party.”

The top story about the Republican Party out of thousands is, yes, that’s correct, a satire by The Onion. 

And it’s been that way for more than 24 hours now.

The best professional Information services in the world can no longer tell the difference between the actual republican party and a fucking joke.

And frankly, neither can I.

Party of Lincoln, my hairy white ass. 

Abraham Lincoln gave his life to hold the Union together, his drooling incestuous political descendants are hell-bent on ripping it apart.

 

These people aren’t the party of Lincoln, they’re the party of Jefferson Davis.  

 

The nuts aren’t running the asylum, folks, nobody is running the asylum. The loons have locked the doctors in the dayroom and they’re capering up and down the hallways covered in their own excrement smashing the windows and lighting the furniture on fire.

Republicans know that their party has gone insane, they just don’t care.

Yesterday, on the National Mall in Washington DC, Texas Tea Party congressman, Randy Neugebauer, in a disgusting display of fake outrage and blatant abuse of congressional power, berated a park ranger in front of TV cameras and made her apologize for the government shutdown that he is personally responsible for.

Neugebauer yelled at the ranger because the Park Service had closed the WWII Monument in accordance with government shutdown requirements. Neugebauer demanded to know how the ranger could turn people away.

"It's difficult," the unidentified park ranger responded.

"Well, it should be difficult," sneered Neugebauer.

"It is difficult," the ranger repeated, and then added, "I'm sorry, sir."

"The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves," said Neugebauer.

"I'm not ashamed," the ranger retorted.

"You should be," snapped Neugebauer.

That’s right, a US Congressman told a federal employee that she should be ashamed for doing the job that he, the congressman, forced her to do. 

Then, when confronted by the angry crowd, Neugebauer ran away like the simpering coward that he is rather than face his own hypocrisy.

The truly ironic part of this pathetic exchange is that the ranger, in defiance of the shutdown, had actually been letting vets into the memorial even though it was technically illegal for her to do so (the Park Service is allowing folks into the moments under the umbrella of the First Amendment, and good on them. They should be commended, not used as a punching bag by grandstanding politicians).

But, she should be ashamed of herself according to Neugebauer.

If I was her, I’d sue this asshole into the poorhouse for creating a hostile workplace.

Here’s the thing, should the WWII memorial be closed?

Yes.

Absolutely yes.

And there should be a sign on the locked gate that says, “Screw you, America.”

And the old veterans denied access should have to stand there in the rain and suffer, with the TV cameras broadcasting it all live and in color.

You don’t get to have it both ways.

Either the government is shut down, or it’s not. 

You don’t get to pull an asshole stunt like this and then avoid the consequences. 

Neugebauer is one of the principal architects of this idiocy, if he wasn’t the puffed up pusillanimous coward that he is, he would have faced that crowd of veterans and owned up to his goddamned responsibilities as a member of the US government.  Sorry fellas, but fuck you, go home and die. My partisan principles are more important than you old geezers getting into the memorial.  

If he thinks a government shutdown is such a fine idea, let him face a crowd of veterans instead of sending the Park Service to do it.

Instead, he ran away like the seditious cowardly son of a bitch that he is.

Insanity I said, and insanity it is. 

These people are stark staring nuts. 

And they know it, they know they’ve gone insane, they just don’t care.

“We’re not going to be disrespected,” declared conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind). “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

We’re not going to be disrespected.

We don’t know what we want, but Goddamnit, we want something!

Anything. Please, Mr. President, give us anything. Anything at all. Please? Please?

Fah.

I’ve got news for you Congressman, respect is earned. You get respect by being worthy of respect. Period. There are no shortcuts. You earn respect by every action, every word, every thought and deed.

If you see only disrespect, then you need only take a look in the mirror. There’s your problem, right there and nowhere else.

If you wonder why you’re seeing only disrespect, take a look at your fellow congressman, Randy Neugebauer.

Despite the Tea Party’s herculean efforts to focus blame anywhere but upon themselves, the vast majority of Americans aren’t buying it.

Now, I think we all know what Republicans think about polls, but reliable running polls right now show that 44% of American voters directly fault the Republicans for the shutdown, while 35% fault President Obama. That’s a huge delta. Huge.

One thing to note, even if Obama was taking the blame for this mess full on, which he’s not, he doesn’t have to worry about being voted out of office in 2014 and 2016.  Republicans are busy right now signing their own death warrants. And they know it. They know it, but they refuse to change course. They can’t, because their hatred of Barack Obama, their utter insane hatred of Barack Obama, is so all consuming that it drives them forward beyond all rational bounds.

That said, an overwhelming 72% of Americans right this very moment strongly disapprove of holding the entire budget hostage over the Affordable Care Act and that includes more than 50% of all Republicans surveyed.

There is no way, no goddamned way, that the extremist lunatics currently holding us at gunpoint can claim to represent the will of the American people.

The day before he was caught harassing a Park Ranger for doing her job, Congressman Randy Neugebauer went onThe Chad Hasty Show and declared that he will keep the government shut down for "as long as it takes.” 

He claimed it was the will of the American people.

The man is either lying or he’s deluded, there are no other options. It’s not the will of the American people.  Provably so.

It’s the will of a small band of extremist lunatics who’ve taken America hostage and are blackmailing the Speaker of the House into doing their malevolent bidding.

In the words of their Patron Saint, they’ve gone rogue.

Literally.

Rogue is literally what you called it when an elephant goes insane. A rogue bull elephant becomes antisocial, vicious, murderous, starts trumpeting wildly and attacking the other members of the herd, biting at its own tail, before rampaging through villages and across the savannah oblivious to the carnage in its wake.

A rogue elephant, could there be a more appropriate metaphor here? 

In 2010 these lunatics took over the House. They read the Constitution out loud before the TV cameras and declared in solemn somber tones that they, they, weren’t going to engage in business as usual. 

Apparently what they meant by that was they weren’t going to allow any business to get done, at all.

Even if they had to destroy the country’s economy to do it.

These people deserve no respect whatsoever, none, they are shrieking loons who need to be strapped to a bed and pumped full of chlorpromazine before they start eating their own feces.

Again, don’t think that they don’t know it either.

In recent days, so many Republicans have acknowledged the cancerous insanity growing malignantly within their own ranks, that the extremists were forced to admit their lunacy or double down on it.  Predictably they did the latter. The Tea Party Express, the hard festering tumor at the center of the diseased Republican Party, sent out a desperate appeal for funds like cancer cells leaking into the bloodstream, declaring of the more moderate members of their party, "With Republicans Like These, Who Needs Democrats?" 

Indeed.

With the government shutdown, the Tea Party cancer has metastasized and unless it is cut out immediately and in total, it will be only a matter of time until these rogue mutant alien cells kill the GOP host. 

And the surgeon elect is the Speaker of the House, John Boehner.

That’s his job.

To cut out the cancer.  To throw himself on the hand grenade for the good of the country. To stand between the village and the charging elephant.

Bringing this to a conclusion is exactly what John Boehner gets paid for, no more, no less. That’s the Speaker’s sworn duty.

Boehner has the votes to override the lunatic fringe within his own party.  By a wide margin.

He knows it. 

They know it.

We all know it.

He’s got more than half of his own party behind him.

He’s got the will of an overwhelming majority of the American people behind him.

The only thing holding him hostage is his own craven cowardice.

It may cost him his job as Speaker, but that’s the goddamned price of doing what’s right, of choosing country over insanity, of choosing duty over self interest, of choosing the actual will of the people over the insanity of a small rogue cadre of suicidal lunatics.

All it takes is for John Boehner to find his tiny withered balls, stand up, turn, face the charging elephant head on, take aim and calmly put the rogue beast down with a single shot right through its malignant heart.

Boehner’s choices are between a small band of extremist Conservikazis and the majority of Americans from both sides of the political aisle.

Where he stands tells you everything you need to know.

Here’s the bottom line, it never ends well for the rogue elephant. Never.

Just as it never ends well for the hostages takers.

If Boehner is unable or unwilling to muster his courage, well then maybe it is time for him to take that flight out of Reagan National.

I hear Argentina is nice this time of year.

 

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* About the time I typed that line, the shooting actually did start in DC.  I’d like to chalk it up to my astounding powers of precognition, but given the number of shootings lately, it’s really not that much of a coincidence, is it?