In one of the more amusing screams to come out of the lethal circus fire that is the Republicans’ “big tent” these days, we now hear this complaint:

• Senate Democrats, from Sen. Bernie Sanders to Sen. Joe Manchin, have followed Sen. Chuck Schumer’s lead and refused to negotiate with Republicans on a path forward to replacing Obamacare.

Well, I could mention the fact that refusing to negotiate and refusing to repeal are two different things, but then I’d pour water on this thing when the really exciting explosions are just about to…

"Deductibles are too high, co-pays are too high." Where’s your plan, @SenSanders? pic.twitter.com/hlRObwgyZw

— GOP (@GOP) July 5, 2017

BOOM!

The reflexive response to a startling bang, twitter or otherwise, is to ask, What the hell was that? In some cases, such as standing a thousand meters away from a fertilizer plant in safety-regulation-hating Texas, such a question is instinctive but absurd. Here, though, you really do have to wonder about the fuel for this bomb. Is it possible that Republicans are so ignorant as to think that Democrats, including Sanders, haven’t made serious proposals to improve health care, health care insurance, and health care access?

Even if they were unaware of such proposals, is this really the way to find out about them? I mean, if they wanted to find out where Democrats’ health care policy proposals have been hiding, they could, of course, Go Ogle “sanders health care plan“, no quotes, and the first result? This page.

Apparently, however, this is too difficult for today’s Republican party. One could say that this is a dumb move politically, as it makes Democratic health care plans more newsworthy and gives them more attention at a time when their monopoly on the USA legislative apparatus meant that until this moment they did not need to compete against good plans in the public eye, they needed only to compete with the health care plan that they, themselves, sabotaged when Democrats negotiated their plan with Republicans 7 years ago. But for Republicans who can’t support a plan unless it throws millions off the rolls of the insured, their experience of attention to their own plan has been pretty gosh darn negative. So, understandably, they thought that if they didn’t like anyone paying attention to their plan (to the point that they needed to hide it even from senators not in the drafting group…and sometimes even from them), Democrats wouldn’t like it if attention were paid to Democratic plans. Yep, understandable. So maybe this wasn’t such a dumb move, just a move that reflects their inability to conceive of people that have actually different ideas, experiences and, um, popularity?

So perhaps this is more a reflection of bad character, an oblivious self-centeredness, than actual lack of intelligence. I mean, while Q is ill defined, there are certain capacities that are generally agreed to be components of overall intelligence that are required in order to memorize Atlas Shrugged and correctly pronounce “tax cuts”.

But while many things about this incident are as yet entirely obscured (such as, who the fuck thought Bernie Sanders didn’t have a health care plan?), at least now we know why the Republicans cannot perform the basic functions of a government:

They have run out of Google. Sad.