A horrid highway accident occurred this week in Tennessee, killing eight people. The National Transportation and Safety Board will not be investigating it because all of that department’s employees are furloughed.
The US Geological Survey is in partial shutdown mode. They posted this on their earthquakes website:
Due to a lapse in Federal funding, the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program has suspended most of its operations. While the USGS will continue to monitor and report on earthquake activity, the accuracy or timeliness of some earthquake information products, as well as the availability or functionality of some web pages, could be affected by our reduced level of operation.
A tropical storm is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s trajectory is predicted to hit the US Gulf Coast. The National Weather Service is also in partial shutdown mode. Like their colleagues at the USGS, they are working “to protect life and property” without pay.
Even a few rangers are working for free. One ranger, working at the World War II Memorial in DC, received as a reward for her unpaid service of some kooky congressman yelling at her, apparently blaming the shutdown on her.
Now wait just a goddamn minute. She’s a park ranger. He’s a congressman. Her job is to protect the park she’s assigned to and serve its visitors. His is to make policy and pass legislation. She’s working for free. He’s doing jack-shit nothing and getting a paycheck.
Who the hell does he think he is? Who the hell do any of the kooky Republicans promulgating this obscene charade of a shutdown think they are?
Well I’ll tell you what I think they are. They are big, fat babies. They are not grown men and women. If I were Endora from Bewitched, I would put a spell on them to dress them all in baby clothes, replete with bonnets and diapers. Barefooted. And the spell would last as long as they continued to hold the country hostage with their childish and dangerous behavior.
Lazy reports, like those from Fox News, have focussed on the closing of national parks and monuments and have generally downplayed the federal shutdown as a nuisance and nothing more. The above stories say otherwise. If a major natural disaster were to strike, a tornado, a hurricane, a flood, a giant forrest fire, an earthquake, we’d be in a world of hurt. But natural disaster victims are not the only casualties. Hundreds and thousands of people are currently not receiving a paycheck. In an economy still very fragile for most Americans that’s a danger. They may be on furlough, but their landlords and mortgage holders are not. And most supermarkets I know of don’t accept IOUs for payment. Furthermore, poor families on public assistance will stop receiving money soon, if they haven’t already. That means kids will starve. In a rich, gluttonous country likes ours that’s an outrage.
This shutdown is not the result of fighting over items in the budget. It’s a last ditch effort to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. That’s the sole purpose of this nonsense. A few big fat babies in Congress cannot reconcile themselves to Obamacare’s existence. So they want to do everything to destroy it, even if that means dismantling the country furloughed program by furloughed program. Obamacare began in earnest this week. The server for the federal website as well as servers for the state-based health insurance exchanges were overloaded by the demand. Folks want healthcare. But that means nothing to the babies. As with all who are terminally immature, they have an engorged sense of entitlement which informs their actions. They feel it is their God-given right to hurt millions of people just for the sake of getting their own way. Well, I’m here to tell them otherwise.
Listen up, babies. Reconcile yourselves to this.
First, the black dude won the election last year. He won by a comfortable margin. Get over it. You ran a candidate who vowed to dismantle Obamacare on day one. That was his major campaign talking point. He lost. So folks clearly didn’t hate the ACA enough to want to dump it before it has a chance to take hold.
Second, your majority in the House of Representatives is illusory. You won by gerrymandering, not because you got the most votes. Nationally, Democrats received the most votes when all House races are added together, but because of gerrymandering in many states, their votes were diluted. So you held on to the House, but only just. Therefore, your mandate is an illusion. You have none. You just proved yourselves better adept at cheating.
Third, you would never put up with this type of behavior from Democrats. If the Democrats had caused a government shutdown in protest of some law that President George W. Bush championed, you would be screaming bloody murder. You would be talking treason and holding hearings to throw everyone in jail for contempt of everything. Yet and still, you feel it is perfectly within your right to do that which you yourselves would never put up with. Again, such behavior is only possible when one has an infantile sense of entitlement.
Cheating and throwing temper tantrums is not governance. It is chaos. This shutdown is a threat to the nation. And if the tantrum lasts long enough to delay raising the debt ceiling, than the damage to the country will be that much worse. This isn’t about President Obama or Senator Harry Reid acting like “adults” and appeasing babies who refuse to behave. This is about the babies remembering that they are full grown adults and sworn leaders of the country.
As President Obama has noted, there are only a handful of Tea Party types promulgating this disaster. All Speaker Boehner has to do is hold a vote to restore government funding and let it pass. It will receive votes from the Republicans who aren’t crazy babies and from the Democratic caucus in the House. The Senate will do the same and then this mess will be over. But Mr. Boehner refuses to do this. He refuses to stand up to the babies and bring them in line.
That makes him the biggest baby of them them all, and a coward. And his cowardice is crippling the nation.
© 2013, gar. All rights reserved.