The government shutdown thing.

Pretty entertaining article's up on Slate right now, covering the government shutdown thing in the way that news media typically covers similar government dysfunction in Third World countries. It makes obvious that journalistic standards need to be raised, and foreign countries treated in the press with the same gravity and seriousness that we treat our own.

But enough about that. This isn't the first government shutdown that's ever happened, and unfortunately it probably won't be the last. All I can hope is that the Republicans actually do it. That way the country - the whole country, not just the people paying attention - will finally realize how deranged they've gotten, and will turn out en masse to return the Democrats to power in the House in 2016. Divided government is shitty government when one party refuses to negotiate, and the Republicans need a time in the wilderness before they can be trusted with power again.

I have dim memories of the first major shutdown, in 1996. My parents were both Republicans, of course, so they bought the GOP line in full. I was only starting to become aware of politics, and my first opinions were basically theirs. "It's Clinton's fault for..." I don't even remember what the talking point was, just that it was his fault somehow. There was no reasoning there, just hatred.

My parents are not dumb people. They were directly affected by the shutdown, because we were a military family. So for those few weeks that the Contract On America held out on Clinton, we went without a lot of stuff. They were being directly affected by Republican intransigence, but I guess cognitive dissonance required them to direct their antipathy towards the Democrats because it couldn't be their team's fault.

Granted, we were an exception. Most of the country blamed the Republicans, and rightly so. But because of that, I doubt that a whole lot of Republican true believers are going to be convinced that their party's turned to shit because of this. I'm fully expecting to go home for Christmas and hear about how this is all Obama's fault because he wouldn't scrap his biggest accomplishment and the nation's biggest accomplishment in the past 30 years.