I didn't believe the government would be shut down.

and you really get pissed off when he does, huh...

seems a vicious circle to me, finky.

For starters you're wrong. The organizer of Honor Flight spoke to a nameless bureaucrat in DC about their next scheduled flight and was told anyone crossing the barricades would be arrested.

Irrespective of anything one believes about the government "shutdown," barricading the WWII memorial was not an unavoidable consequence, it was mean-spirited, petty and spiteful, and it was, in a very warped way, intended to irk conservatives.

I have less than zero respect for the so-called Teaparty.

Geez, no kidding?

Barricading the memorial is wrong, but I don't hear protests about this sort of thing:
KHOU TONIGHT AT 10: A local boy is hoping an experimental treatment will save him from a rare and fatal disease, but testing has been delayed because of the government shutdown. We’ll talk with his angry family, tonight at 10.

Probably because it hasn't gotten a lot of media attention.

All any caring member of congress has to do is go on the floor and propose funding of this testing. Then we will see what we will see.

Opening the government is the only option, or it should be. But I know you want to make Democrats responsible for this child's suffering. No way the teabaggers are responsible for any of the nation's problems, right?

Obviously it's not the only option because contrary to what you previously suggested (and then corrected) members of the military are being paid.

Why would anyone, Republican or Democrat, vote for an exception to fund this testing?

Well, I could tell you why a Democrat wouldn't, but you would only respond with tea-bagger slurs.

how many more stories like this will pop up?

if the tea-baggers weren't forcing a shutdown, none of these folks would be hurting like this, and special single exceptions would be unnecessary...

tea bagger

tea bagger

tea bagger...

It's slurs to the blind faith members, but the strategy to divide and conquer is so plain, even you must grasp it. Let the piecemeal bills through and increase the stranglehold on the rest. Then you've got the country by the balls, fast and sure. If it had been me, no pieces like that would have gotten through.

Jonah Goldberg:

I think it's time the Democrats remade "The Life of Julia," only instead of beginning every panel with "Under President Obama" and showing a girl achieving all of her dreams thanks to the beneficence of the One, they should begin it "Under the GOP's Shutdown."

Under the Shutdown: Julia's father goes off to forage for supplies. But he makes too much noise while trying to smash up a grand piano for firewood and is caught by a pack of cannibalistic former air-traffic controllers. Days later, all Julia finds of her father is a single bloody foot.

Under the Shutdown: On Julia's ninth birthday, her mother gives her a boomerang with a razor-sharp edge. Later, when a band of nomads surrounds her compound Ed Schultz tries to catch it and loses his fingers.

Under the Shutdown: At the age of 17, Julia is told that under President Obama she would have been preparing to take her SATs this week. Julia barely looks up from the campfire, shrugs, and returns to sharpening the tip of a spear made from an old Jiffy Lube flagpole.

Under the Shutdown: When Julia turns 21 she feels secure for the first time in her hard life when she joins a snake cult run out of the old Toledo Mud Hens stadium. (Sad side note: When they try to bathe her feral child in the ceremonial baths, the urchin hisses, and runs away, never to be heard from again.)

Shutdown Rashomon

Given that the two political parties are chiefly divided over the role of government, it shouldn't surprise anyone that folks on the right and left have divergent views of the shutdown. Contrary to a lot of hootenanny and balderdash, Republicans aren't happy about the shutdown, but they do enjoy mocking liberals about it. That's because conservatives are not in fact anarchists. We believe that there are some things the government must do. And there are even a few things that it should do even if it is not required to. The government must have an army. But -- I believe -- it should fund the NIH.

These are distinctions that I think most conservatives find quite easy to make. But from the liberal perspective, it's all one seamless garment of government. Moreover, government is the only true and complete expression of what the old progressives used to call "the national idea" or what the Germans called the Volksgemeinschaft. It's the collective spirit of the whole people, the Hegelian God State. Mussolini defined fascism as "everything within the state, nothing outside the state." Barack Obama is much more pithy in his description of progressive government: "The government is us."

But we are not the government. The best you can say is that the government represents us, works for us, in very limited ways. But the government is no more me than my lawyer is me. My lawyer works for me, he represents me, but he's not my daughter's father, he's not my wife's husband, he's not the author of this all-too-phoned-in "news"letter. He's just the guy who explains to the judge how I have no idea how all those chinchillas ended up in my trunk and that if I'd had my druthers I would have changed out of my codpiece prior to my court appearance.

Obama's Shutdown

The point I'm getting to is that President Obama has a lot at stake in this shutdown psychologically. If you honestly believe -- or if you simply want Americans to believe -- that government is just "another word for those things we do together," then you need to do everything you can to prove that's true. I'm not saying that a government shutdown is without painful consequences, but Obama seems to have a version of Munchausen's syndrome; he wants to inflict pain to prove that government is the only cure.

Or to put it another way, if you run a protection racket and a storekeeper doesn't pay up, it's in your interest to make sure that things go badly for him.

Yes, Occam's Razor dictates that Obama's primary motive is to put pressure on Republicans and win a PR battle. But lurking behind that, I think, is a deeper conviction: The American people need to learn that the "government is us."

Government Taken

I keep thinking of the movie Taken. As I wrote at the time, it was "Thelma and Louise for fathers." Liam Neeson plays a dad who doesn't get the respect he deserves from his ex-wife and daughter. They think he's kind of a loser and ridiculously overprotective. But the moment Neeson's daughter strays from the genius of his fatherly advice, she's immediately kidnapped by Albanian Muslim white slavers. See? This is simply what happens when you don't listen to Dad! All of a sudden, Dad doesn't looks so ridiculous, does he? It's a shame she had to learn the lesson the hard way -- or that her trampy friend had to die in the process -- but the good news is that by the end of the movie everyone understands that Father Knows Best.

I think that in the back of his mind a certain part of Obama wants the government story to play out like a political version of Taken, where he is the father figure who not only comes to the rescue, but is vindicated in every regard. The only problem -- well, not the only problem, given the wackiness of the analogy, but stick with me -- is that events can't play out that way on their own. So to change analogies as violently as something that violently changes from one thing into another really violently, he's acting like some campus activist who needs a hoax to prove he was right about the crisis he's been complaining about all along. So he's making the shutdown hurt as much as he can. It's like a director's cut of Taken where we find out that Neeson actually paid the Albanians to kidnap his daughter just to make him look good.

Progressives and Power

Charlie Cooke had a very good column and follow up post this week on progressive disdain for our system of separated powers. What liberals want, according to Charlie, is an "elected king" who can do whatever he wants. I agree with him almost entirely. For instance, he doesn't say it, but this is exactly what Thomas Friedman wants. It's what all the pseudo-eggheady-jagoff technocrats always want. The desire to simply impose "optimal policies" heedless of democratic or legal impediments lies behind virtually every technocratic fad of the last couple of centuries. We know what to do, and the problem with democracy is that the rubes won't let us do it! Stuart Chase, one of the architects of the New Deal (who some say coined the term), openly pleaded for an "economic dictatorship." After all, he asked, "why should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?"

But here's where I disagree a bit with Charlie. The key issue for progressives has never been the form power takes, but power itself. You want my five-second lesson in progressive history? No? Sucks for you, because I'm going to tell you anyway: They always go where the field is open.

That's it.

When the public was on their side the progressives relied on the public. That's why we have the direct election of senators. That's why women got the franchise. Etc. In his early years as an academic Woodrow Wilson wanted Congress to run the country -- the way parliament runs England -- and relegate the president to a glorified clerk. When the public became unreliable and Congress was no longer a viable vehicle, progressives suddenly fell in love with a Caesarian presidency. Indeed, Wilson himself, the former champion of Congress, became an unapologetic voluptuary of presidential power the moment it suited him -- and nary a progressive complained (save poor Randolph Bourne, of course). The progressives rode the presidency like it was a horse they never expected to return to a stable. And when that started to hit the point of diminishing returns, they moved on to the courts (even as they bleated and caterwauled about Nixon's "abuses" of powers that were created and exploited by Wilson, FDR, and Johnson). After the courts, they relied on the bureaucracy. Like water seeking the shortest path, progressives have always championed the shortest route to social-justice victories.

My point is that I think Charlie is entirely right that progressives want to maximize their power. But the elected king scenario is just one of many they'd be perfectly happy with. If they could have a politburo instead of a unitary executive, they'd probably prefer that. But the point is that the instruments are, uh, instrumental. The core imperative is power. We see this in miniature when liberals don't control the presidency but do control Congress. Suddenly, it's vital that the "people's house" exert its constitutional prerogatives! When the president is a Democrat he needs to rule unimpaired. When he's a Republican, his dictatorial tendencies must be held in check. When liberals want to reinterpret the Constitution by judicial whim or fiat, it's proof that the Constitution is living up to its nature as a "living, breathing, document." When conservatives actually want to amend the Constitution -- the only legitimate and constitutional means to change the meaning of the Constitution, I might add -- it is a horrible affront to the vision of the Founders!

Once you realize this it helps explain so many of the Left's hypocrisies and alleged double standards. I say alleged, because they aren't really double standards. You can only have a double standard when you actually believe something should be a standard. Ultimately, for progressives these procedural debates about how power is used in America are just that: procedural debates. The alleged standards at stake are evanescent and petty -- for liberals. The only true standard is whatever advances the progressives' ball downfield. That is the very heart of "social justice" -- doing whatever "good" you can, when you can, however you can. As they say, behind every confessed double standard there is an unconfessed single standard. And for progressives, the single enduring standard is "whatever works for us."

emphasis added

http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/10/03/obama-shuts-down-d-day-beaches-cemetery-normandy

Holy ****. That's what I have been saying about the teabaggers.
" the single enduring standard is "whatever works for us.""

Well, that's just goes to show how much you hate this country. Isn't that the line favored by liberals? Republicans are willing to do anything to the country to make a point?

"Tea-bagger" is a slur, pure and simple. You know it is and you revel in using it. Not too big a deal unless you are someone (and you are) who likes to spout off about decency and tolerance, and then it's only a clear sign of hypocrisy.

So, by the way, is your pal Rocky.

Teabaggers are the bane of this nation, at this point in history. We need their input like horseshoes on cows.

g'nite finky.

sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite...

Must be a bitch you living in Texas and all.

Have a couple of spoons of gluten before you hit the hay Rocky.

what a lovely thing to say, finky.

may you one day wake up and have grown a real conscience...

Even in Texas, there are people with a little sense. Maybe not enough to ward off nut jobs like Ted Cruz, today, but, their day will come. All politics run in cycles.