Wrestlemania in The House!

When last I posted, the government shutdown was just getting revved up--but now, after only the span of a fortnight bloated by a 3-day holiday weekend, it is rolling to a stop.

Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.

I'm kind of bummed that it's ending so soon. I was just getting packed up to head out west to the shuttered Yellowstone National Park to see how long I could dodge the remaining Park Police before getting kicked out--it was going to be a giddy recreation of my childhood in Troy, NY,  where we entertained ourselves by riding our bikes all over the campus of the renowned Emma Willard girls' school, while the "pinkos" (for some reason that's what we called the campus security officers) in their golf carts tried to catch us.

Anyway, the inevitable result of the Congressional melodrama has finally, um, resulted: House leaders, including Speaker John Boehner, along with a modest number of fellow Republicans (87 in total, which is about the number of people serviced in a span of 15 minutes by any given Starbucks), conceded and approved a bill to reopen the government and avoid pulling an economic Thelma and Louise.

Not surprisingly, Boehner made an upbeat, folksy statement to save face while finally abandoning the cynical and myopic obstructionism that his party has been engaged in for the last 2 weeks:

“We fought the good fight,” said Speaker John A. Boehner, who has struggled to control conservative faction in the House, in an interview with a Cincinnati radio station. “We just didn’t win.” 

Good fight? You lost the good fight in September. This was a baaaaad fight. This was you losing the fight, and then clobbering your victorious opponent with a folding chair as soon as he left the ring. This could only be considered a good fight if your entire political ethos was based on professional wrestling.



Of course, Boehner didn't really need to save face--he already did that simply by admitting defeat without crying.

Anyway, now that this is all behind us, we can finally get back to some serious political issues, like exposing our president for the Kenyan Islamist pinko that he is.

Storm Clouds: Weather, Politics and Class II Narcotics

With all the media coverage of Hurricane Sandy, the presidential race was largely absent for almost a week. For those paying close attention, however, it wasn't gone entirely—here's what I gleaned of the electioneering efforts in the days since the storm took center stage. (I have 20/20 vision, so I'm pretty good at gleaning.)

With his campaign on hold, Mr. Obama appeared on TV to say some presidential things about the planned emergency effort.



Seeing as press briefings are a typical response to an impending natural disaster even when no election is on the horizon, and since at no point during this appearance did the president re-state that Osama bin Laden is dead, I'll refrain from viewing it as a staged campaign-proxy event.

That said, that sort of leadership display is still a boost for the president's image at this crucial time in the election season, so it's to be expected that his challenger, Mr. Romney, though not wanting to be seen tactlessly campaigning during a time of national distress, would still wish to curry favor with the electorate, as there are mere days remaining until said electorate sets out to electorize a president.

This he accomplished by turning one of his Ohio campaign stops into a canned food drive.

And then by delivering food & supplies to hurricane victims. All of which was accomplished with the utmost modesty, of course.

I should mention that having been figuratively "under the weather" since before the entire eastern seaboard found itself literally under the weather, I spent the days in and around the storm under a cloud of doctor-prescribed, codeine-infused cough syrup. My recall of recent events is consequently a little hazy, but in addition to the actual candidates, I seem to remember John McCain appearing on television and declaring Hurricane Sandy the result of Obama's "disastrous foreign policy."

There's a chance that that one was a hallucination. Or maybe my fevered brain perceived an exaggerated version of his statements. But I can't be that far off—these days John McCain seems to have nothing to do with his time other than to shamelessly and repeatedly parrot any GOP talking-point stuck in front of his nose.



McCain has been repeating that statement about Obama's supposed massive cover-up or gross incompetence ad nauseum for the last several weeks in his every public appearance, and by doing so, not only is he accelerating the shift of his legacy from respected war veteran to transparent partisan shill, he is also firmly placing himself in the company of maniacs like Donald "I'm not a racist but prove to me that this black president wasn't born in Africa" Trump:



On the other hand, maybe Trump is the one who suffers more for their association. McCain's recent statements, and his increasingly hard-right views in general, appear to be a bitter reflection of his own loss against candidate Obama. McCain seems like a once-noble man whose rationality has given way to resentment—who is now all too eager to serve as a cynical and zealous tool for a flip-flopping Mormon in hopes of exacting revenge on the guy who bested him several years ago when we last electorized a president. At least Trump—while he may be is a maniac, and clearly possesses little in the way of rationality—most certainly never says anything he doesn't whole-heartedly believe.

I'm not entirely sure which is worse. Though I'm also not entirely sure that Donald Trump isn't a figment of my codeine-addled imagination. Some things are just too hard to glean.