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"  Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Real Life) went on the Morning Squint program on MSNBC today for the purposes of being really stupid. He succeeded splendidly, did young Sean. &amp;quot;I think are you a part of the problem,&amp;quot; Duffy said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re part of the problem because the Republican caucus sometimes can be unreasonable, but look how far we want to move. We said we want to defund [Obamacare]. Now we want to delay it. Now we&amp;#039;re just going to ask for some very simple tweaks and reforms. If you actually called out your liberal guests and said, &amp;#039;Why won&amp;#039;t you join for Obamacare? If it&amp;#039;s good for Americans, it should be good for you?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Because I speak all dialects of wingnut, but my weakest one is utter gibberish, so I may be misinterpreting the dumbassery on display here, but what in the unholy fk is this cluck talking about? People don&amp;#039;t have to &amp;quot;join for Obamacare&amp;quot; -- The grammar nuns of my youth are at 78 rpm. -- if they already can afford insurance. Are the 24-year-olds who can stay on their parent&amp;#039;s health plan &amp;quot;joining for Obamacare?&amp;quot; The people whose insurance companies no longer can dump them for pre-existing conditions, or the parents who no longer have to worry about a lifetime cap on medical expenses for their disabled child, did these people &amp;quot;join for Obamacare&amp;quot;? Does the Congressman honestly believe that the Affordable Care Act makes poor people sign up so that other people, with health-insurance that they pay for themselves, somehow get away with something scot-free? (I guess I can honestly say that I &amp;quot;joined for Romneycare&amp;quot; up here because I took advantage of the exchange system that was put in place.) Here&amp;#039;s a guy who nearly helped hammer the world economy into mulch, and he plainly doesn&amp;#039;t know what in the hell is in the law over which the whole cataclysm began. To borrow a phrase from the great Dan Jenkins, Congressman Duffy has delivered proof positive that, if he had a brain, he&amp;#039;d be out in the yard playing with it. Now that the people in the Senate seem to have crafted a stop-gap measure to reopen the government while avoiding turning the United States into an international deadbeat, pathos abounds on Capitol Hill. Marco Rubio, still struggling from the shrink wrap, has decided that vandalism is still a career path. &amp;quot;I cannot support this deal because it postpones any significant action on pro-growth and spending reforms and does nothing to provide working class Americans even one shred of relief from ObamaCare&amp;#039;s harmful effects,&amp;quot; he said in a statement. &amp;quot;Until we tackle the real threats to the American Dream, we are going to continue finding ourselves in these kinds of messes,&amp;quot; he added. &amp;quot;America is better than this, and the American people deserve better.&amp;quot; Good lord, what an empty suit. But, naturally, the real fun is going on in the monkeyhouse across the Capitol is aflame. Guess what? The press is to blame. &amp;quot;Has anybody seen the media person to ask a liberal Democrat why it&amp;#039;s okay to extend a delay to corporations and not individuals?&amp;quot; added Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) rhetorically. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve seen it once. You know where I&amp;#039;ve seen it? Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. It&amp;#039;s the only time I&amp;#039;ve seen that question asked.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been talking amongst this group for the last four weeks about fairness, about whether or not it&amp;#039;s fair to give extensions to people who have political connections and make our families live under a different law,&amp;quot; he continued. &amp;quot;That is a winning argument for us. But no one asked that question. ... Somebody asked whether it would be different next time, in January or February, whenever we take this up again. The natural inclination is to say &amp;#039;No, it will be exactly the same.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; See? Nobody respected our winning arguments, therefore the lost. (What are the odds that Mulvaney&amp;#039;s family &amp;quot;lives under a different law&amp;quot;? How&amp;#039;s that single-payer plan you get through your job working out, Mick?) Elsewhere, paranoia strikes deep. Into your life, it will creep. &amp;quot;I think that&amp;#039;s something our leadership has been pretty naive about. They think they&amp;#039;re negotiating with somebody who&amp;#039;s unwilling to breach the debt ceiling,&amp;quot; Labrador said. &amp;quot;I think he has wanted to breach the debt ceiling because he knows that the media will blame the Republican Party.&amp;quot;  Meanwhile, the former head of the A/V Club on Easter Island is promising retribution. There will be blood. And new alien life forms. &amp;quot;Absolutely,&amp;quot; Freedomworks CEO and President Matt Kibbe said on CNN when asked if House Republicans would pay a &amp;quot;political price&amp;quot; for voting for the plan. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re seeing that and a repopulation of the Republican party.&amp;quot; I honestly don&amp;#039;t think the Palin family can work that quickly, but you never know.  It looks at the moment like castrato Speaker John Boehner will throw this up for a vote, and that Nancy Pelosi will loan him enough Democrats to get the thing passed, and the government will reopen, and the damage still will be lasting and profound because a lot of what we thought about how the government should work has been shredded by the triumphal ignorance of a collection of people without the fundamental patriotism god gave a goat. Unless the Democrats take full advantage of what the Republicans have done to themselves, and my money is on no such thing happening, the cycle will begin to accelerate all over again. Conservatism once again will pretend that it really had nothing to do with this fiasco, and it will be what it has been since Barry Goldwater allied it with the detritus of American apartheid, and since Jerry Falwell allied it with splinter Protestantism, and since Ronald Reagan married it to economic snake oil -- the party of no responsibility at all, a whorehouse with 500 piano players. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25285/today-in-the-reign-of-morons-ends-101613/>