All or Nothing
By Emma X

Emma X
If there was a shut down button
for Congress, I'd push it.  I wish a
government shut down defunded
political rhetoric.

Well folks, they did it.  They shut it down.  Not that we didn’t know it would happen, but it is still pretty amazing to think that our Congressional Representatives are leaders of the free world.  Do you ever wonder why the rest of the planet thinks we are stupid ignorant narcissistic jerks?  Take a look at the 113^th Congress.

Official Portrait of the 113th Congress.
A bigger parade of self-aggrandizing sphincters you
will not find anywhere.  America is truly exceptional.

So we don’t know how long it will go on, or who will blink first, but make no mistake, the perpetrators of this fiasco do not feel your pain, nor would they respond kindly if they did.    War planners calculate for an acceptable amount of collateral damage, and Big Business has rendered themselves untouchable in this economy.  They have theirs.  This is about power.  The concerns of small businesses and the American people in general have not been a factor in this ideological debate for ten years, despite the ‘we the people’ rhetoric that is tossed to the crowd like cheap candy and plastic beads.  This is a battle between Big Government and Big Business masked as a personal freedoms debate, and you might be shocked to know what the millionaire mercenaries in Congress are willing to take down to win.  You got a small taste this week.

Tea Party Big Insurance patrons
feel that Federal Government interference in the industry
 will ruin profits and take the food right out of their mouths.
They've got the time and resources to wait this thing out,
though.  If their Congressmen don't perform, they'll
buy new ones.  The goal is to be just like Wall Street;
too big and entrenched to fail.

So who is ahead so far?  Well, nobody.  But both sides claim righteous indignation.  Polls before and after the default blame Republicans, but they are whining all over the airways, decrying misplaced culpability.  They tried 42 times to repeal Obamacare.  They took the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.  They launched an expensive several month media ad campaign to convince America that Obamacare is a Socialist evil.  They told us for several months that they would shut down the government to defund it.  Then they did.   Now they claim they didn’t do it, Obama did.  They are having tantrums like two-year-olds in public.  Not exactly a winning posture.  So I guess we have to award the first blood strike to the Democrats, even though it was self-inflicted by the Tea Party.  Despite all expensive efforts to defeat it, Obamacare is now law.  And ironically, it is funded.

Mitch McConnell says that
the Democrats have rejected reasonable
legislative compromises.  Conserva-
tives offered to defeat, then defund,
and then delay implementation.  I
guess those three 'Ds' are the new
working definition of Republican
middle ground.  They are actually say-
ing what they proposed throughout this
whole debacle is a middle ground position.
If you press against your temples firmly
with both hands right now, your head may
 not explode.

Conservatives claim that the President refused to cooperate with them.  I don’t know how you negotiate with playground bullies.  What?  I’ll give you half of my lunch money and one of my sneakers, now go away and don’t come back?  But I have to say that the Obama Administration did a pitiful job of educating the American people about Obamacare, allowing the Tea Party to spread their stock in trade lies, confusion, and fear.

The 1995 government shutdown lasted over three weeks, with terrible political repercussions for Republicans.  This one looks to last longer, considering the atmosphere of gridlock that has permeated the last two Congressional sessions, and the general spirit of meanness that pervades the process.  Tea Party candidates are beholden to no one but their patrons, so they have nothing to lose, including their Gerrymandered House seats.  On October 17^th America defaults on its debt.  At that time the Treasury will not be able to honor U.S. financial commitments.  That’s when the elephant shit hits the proverbial world-wide fan.  That is when your investments and retirement take a hit, and your job may be in jeopardy.  But if you wish, you will still be able to sign up for cheaper health insurance.  How whimsical.

Here's the plan.  When the Tea Party
is finished screwing the main stream
Republican caucus, they will buck that pesky
middle class off of their backs for good.
Hang on tight, folks.  They've been
fantasizing about doing this for a decade.

Unfortunately for Conservative legislators there is no political party health insurance.  Tea Party politics introduced an aggressive deadly cancer into their core that has metastasized without treatment, and gently put, the Republican Party should be getting their affairs in order.  Their odds of survival as they stand are minimal.  The American electorate is confused, but it does not have Alzheimer’s.  We will remember this feces-hurling hate-fest in 2014 and 2016.

Its the beginning of the end, and time for the hard liners to start heading toward the place where failed political ideologies go to die.  The careers of leading politicians involved in this fiasco will not survive.  For the others, it will be best to establish a new generational identity.