Ba-a-ad Republcans! Ba-a-ad Republcans!

"Not since my children were 3 or 4 years old," says NY Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter, "have I seen such obstinate inability to accept the facts."

by Ken

The Republican shutter-downers think they can hornswoggle American into believing that they're just trying to get a fair hearing from those Kremlin-red Democrats, including the president, for their noble ideas. Of course, they have no noble ideas, and there's a reason why they can't get a fair hearing. They're the ravings of lunatics and thugs. But I think they may do well persuading fact-deprived and reality-challenged Americans, who are likely to take the "plague on both their houses" approach.

Except in this case we know where the plague is.

The right-wing devils love, of course, to play the tune sounded by, for example, the Dunce of Georgia, Rep. Jack Kingston, about how that hyperpartisan President Obama "is proudly negotiating with the Iranians" but "will not negotiate with the Republicans." It never occurs to these buttwipes that they themselves are, quite properly, the butt of their imagined cleverness. Yes, by comparison with the House Republicans, the Iranians whom reasonable people can talk to.

"On the second day of the shutdown," Dana Milbank writes in his Washington Post column today ("Republicans are going to need a bigger lifeboat"), "House Republicans continued what might be called the lifeboat strategy: deciding which government functions are worth saving."

In: veterans, the troops and tourist attractions. Out: poor children, pregnant women and just about every government function that regulates business or requires people to pay taxes.

The lifeboat strategy was the brainchild of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), the freshman who has become the de facto leader of congressional Republicans in the shutdown. On Tuesday, GOP House members introduced bills that would exempt three entities: the national parks, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the District of Columbia. On Wednesday, they added the National Institutes of Health and pay for National Guard members and military reservists.

And then there's all the stuff ruled ineligible for the lifeboats, which includes:

market regulation, chemical spill investigations, antitrust enforcement, worksite immigration checks, workplace safety inspections, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service's audit capabilities, communications and trade regulation, nutrition for 9 million children and pregnant women, flu monitoring and other functions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and housing rental assistance for the poor.

It's not hard to figure out the "strategy" at work here.

The pattern, it seems, is that House Republicans propose to rescue the most visible casualties of the shutdown, such as the national parks and trash collection in the capital. Efforts to help veterans, active-duty troops and reservists are popular but largely unnecessary because most of them were unaffected by the shutdown. The NIH's work isn't always visible, but the agency has powerful supporters who want research on their pet causes.

Perhaps more revealing were those who haven't earned a place in the conservatives' lifeboat: entities that check the power of industry and entities that protect workers and the poor. They may be the most hurt by a government shutdown, but they don't have a place in the conservative utopia as defined by the lifeboat strategy.

Dana quotes NY Rep. Louise Slaughter, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee: "Not since my children were 3 or 4 years old have I seen such obstinate inability to accept the facts." That sounds about right.

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