The Republicans were warned, again and again and again, that it was bad politics to shutdown the government or risk a default. Many clearly knew that was true or they wouldn’t have spent so much time trying to blame Harry Reid and Obama. But the tragic flaw for people who think facts don’t count is they don’t listen to facts. In the case of the government shutdown, the Teaparty wing dragged the rest of the GOP into a suicide mission and now they’re all paying the price:

(.pdf) — The Republicans in Congress have lost ground against Barack Obama in blame over the government shutdown, with Americans expressing increasing criticism of both parties in Washington, while the president’s
avoided that rise in public ire. Seventy percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll disapprove of how the Republicans in Congress are handling the budget negotiations, up 7 percentage points from a week ago. Far fewer, 51 percent, disapprove of Obama’s approach, essentially unchanged in the past week.
Daily Kos — The net margins are even more dramatic. Obama is -6 at 45-61 (it was -9 last week, so an improvement). Democrats are -26 at 35-61. Republicans are at a whopping -46, or 24-70. Or put yet another way, Obama has a net 40-point advantage on the issue over congressional Republicans. Last week, it was just 28 points.

Another poll taken over the weekend shows similar momentum to blame the GOP. In their last ditch desperation to kill Obamacare they took the spotlight off the slowly responding and frequently down Helathcare.gov website. Which has dragged on long enough to bother me, let alone journalist looking for a story on an otherwise slow Fall day. The Teaparty’s stupidity and obsession with O-care gave us cover on that, bizarre.

Some of these fanatics ran on the promises of shutting the government down, so maybe it’s not too surprising they’re getting the majority of the blame for it. But it won’t sit well with the saner ones. Another poll or two like this and suddenly John Boehner will discover the votes he claimed didn’t exist on Sunday, if only to make the pain stop. He’s not the opnly one feeling the pain, either:

TPM — Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that while he believes many individuals are at fault, including President Barack Obama, he said Cruz and others who bought into the quixotic campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act “took a lot of folks into the ditch.”

“But if I had to cast blame anywhere, I would say it was Sen. Cruz and those who insisted upon this tactic that we all knew was not going to succeed,” Dent said. “What he did essentially, Sen. Cruz, basically, he took a lot of folks into the ditch. Now that we’re in the ditch, you can’t get out of the ditch, the senator has no plan to get out of the ditch, those of us who do have a plan to get out of the ditch and will vote to get out of the ditch will then be criticized by those who put us in the ditch in the first place.”

That is exactly how guerrilla movements operate. Fuck it all to hell, blow up shit and hurt people, then blame it on your opponent for letting it happen and not fixing it. We did it to the Brits in 1776, the Marxists did it a hundred years ago, Mussolini did it a couple of decades later in Italy, and Iraqi insurgents did it to us.

The GOP is harboring precisely that kind of thing: your party is nurturing a growing undemocratic guerrilla movement, Mr Dent, a radical, latent violent one, whipped into a cold-civl-war frenzy on manufactured outrage and fabrications that could ignite into a real war with a single thrown bomb or lit match. You fucking assholes are playing with fire and have been my entire adult life. It’s somewhat satisfying to see that fire beginning to be turned on fellow party members,  as it always is in the end, when the Long Knives come out.