Now that the shut down has ended with nothing gained by it but plenty lost by people all over the country, we have the inevitable post-mortems that seek to pin the blame on some and rescue the reputations of others, all done by means of anonymous leaks to the media by those allied with the various Republican factions that ended up losing.
First up are leaks from the camp of speaker John Boehner trying to rehabilitate his reputation for being a sensible deal maker who was boxed in by intransigents within his own party, saying that he never wanted to shut the government down in the first place but got ‘overrun’ by the Tea Partiers and forced to do so, and once the shut down went into play had no choice but to prolong it until the very last minute before completely capitulating.
Not mentioned is that he could have ended the shut down early by bring it up for a vote but did not do so in order to keep his job. That is glossed over because this is his side of the story and actions taken just to keep his job at enormous cost to the country does not make him look good.
In this telling of the story, the Tea Party faction and Ted Cruz are the villains. The next episode of this never-ending soap opera will be people from that camp giving their version of the story, how they were the one who heroically fought on principle but were betrayed by those who simply want to make deals. In this version, I expect senator Mitch McConnell to be the villain..
This is how the game is played in Washington.
We’re about three days from it becoming the Obama shutdown bravely defeated by Boehner at one minute to midnight.
My worry is that the Tea Party faction message will end with “WAIT ‘TIL NEXT YEAR!”
Latest headline.
AFAICT, one of the huge losers was Cruz.
He has shown himself to be an unlikeable person, a demagogue, a scarey extremist, and an idiot.
Most of his colleagues including Republicans don’t seem to like him. All he can do is call that…a mistake.
Supposedly people claim he isn’t dumb, being Harvard educated and so on. I certainly haven’t noticed that.
One of the huge gainers were our enemies and our competitors. Even the Afghani Taliban put out a press release laughing at us.
The shutdown cost us a lot. The USA was the big loser here.
1. It was $24 billion just in direct costs.
2. It also made the USA, correctly, appear politically unstable to our allies and trading partners. The USA likes to claim to lead the world, sometimes with good reasons. We can’t make that claim if everyone is watching us fall apart in pointless political battles.
If the USA goes down, it takes a lot of the world with it. The dollar is still the reserve currency, a fact that a lot of nations worry about right now.
This crisis was entirely human caused and had no worthwhile goals. The GOP is going to destroy the USA to keep a few poor, self employed, and preexisting causes people from buying private health insurance?
3 .. 2 .. 1 ..
Cruz: Senate won’t make same mistake in next fight
Did the Republicans actually lose?
appear politically unstable
What do you mean “appear”?
Oops replied on wrong comment; should be on the one below.
There is always another version.
I’m sure that if I search Twitter and the media long and hard enough I’ll find a version where Obama was in the congressional cloakroom pistol whipping GOP congressmen to force them to shut down the government. I mean … there was a big black man with a really nasty looking gun … what could I do?
Not sure what you mean. I’ll assume that rather than “appear” the better word is “is” meaning the USA is politically unstable.
The USA is the last superpower and largest economy and so on. Since the world is highly integrated and interconnected, if we run into serious trouble, so does everyone else. When the US went down with the Great Recession, so did Europe.
Just appearing or actually being politically unstable is going to cause a lot of harm to our interests. Already the Chinese are asking why they are holding 1.3 trillion USD of US Treasuries which might end up in default. Made worse if the dollar they are denominated in, falls over.