128.6 - Outrage of the Week: government shutdown

Outrage of the Week: government shutdown

Okay, it's time for one of our regular weekly features, the Outrage of the Week.

You know, I generally at least try to avoid topics that are so much in the news unless I think I can offer some perspective clearly different from what you get in the mainstream media. Which actually is true most of the time, but still, you know that I generally don't talk about The Big News of the Day.

But two things inspired me to make an exception this week and to make the government shutdown the Outrage of the Week.

One inspiration, quite frankly, was the image to the right. It's the front page of the New York Daily News for October 1 and I think it is such a brilliant summing up of the case that I had to have a reason to include it in the show.

And let's not forget, all the ransom the tea baggers are demanding for deigning to allow the government to function is for a continuing resolution that funds the government until December 15. Which means even if you gave in and gave them everything in their wish list, in what, 10 weeks, the cretins of Congress could be making a whole new set of demands, taking a whole new set of legislative hostages.

Before the shutdown actually happened, some people were speculating on if the right wing was, as much of the mass media would have it, playing political chicken and that a deal would be worked out in the last minute or at worst on the first day or two of the shutdown. In response, I wrote that, quoting myself,

the wingnuts and wackos are not just playing games but that they really do want to shut down the government. Because they genuinely do hate the idea that the government has a responsibility to "promote the general welfare" and are quite willing to see tens of millions of others - including many of their own supporters - suffer in service to their reactionary ideology.

That's the core: Why are they willing to go to the wall and even through it? Because they don't care if people suffer. Because, for a lot of them, it doesn't affect them, so they just don't care.

As one example, one GOPper in the House, one David Schweikert of Arizona, was positively flippant, referring to the shutdown as part of a "dance" and saying of the shutdown "This is my idea of fun." And he can say that because this dedicated public servant whose only interest is the good of the nation has a net worth of over $6.1 million. Some 800,000 people are already going without pay - but it doesn't affect him, in fact, he still gets paid, so it's "fun."

These slime-ridden death eaters, the core of them, have been gerrymandered into supremely safe seats, gotten their sinecures where they can have their fun saying no to anything and everything whether or not anyone gets hurt, whether or not anyone is denied aid of justice - because they just don't care. And that is a moral and ethical outrage.

Sources:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/multimillionaire-republican-lawmaker-says-go
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2011/12/arizonas_10-member_congression.php
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/30/how-congress-will-still-get-paid-in-a-government-shutdown.html