A Humungus Promise

I feel the need to apologize to you all. I've just looked back at the anemic offering on this page over the first three quarters of the year, and I'm saddened. Yes, because my well of creativity seems to have run low and for a time, life lost its charm. But I'm saddened more so because the previous two posts have been utterly humorless screeds about politics, which nobody comes here to read, and about which, to be honest, I have a significantly diminishing interest/patience.

So starting today, I promise not to waste anyone's time with idle teeth gnashing about any boot-licking snollygosters. From now on, we'll return to exploring the humor of the apocalypse together. I can't promise much more frequency in posting, but I'll try to make up for lack of quantity with higher quality. Dogs of War deserve better.

So as a bit of penance, I have a little morsel for you. It's likely that nobody will get as much enjoyment from this as me, but I nearly peed my little Humungus pants laughing when I received this in the mail:

 Of course you want me back. I understand your pain. We've all lost somebody we loved. But we do it my way! My way.

And so the metamorphosis continues.

American Fifth Column

So any Dogs of War who may lurk around my Facebook page may have already seen most of this post, but I feel it bears repeating. And I know you probably hate people telling you to eat your vegetables, but read it again. It'll be good for you. 

I made a joke comparing the Republican efforts to shutdown the government to a famous Civil War attack during the battle of Gettysburg called Pickett's Charge. The attack is named for Maj. General George Pickett, who was ordered to lead his men -- after two days of fighting -- in a charge on the center of the Union lines, an act that required running nearly a mile across open farm fields under a constant barrage of cannon and musket fire. It ended poorly for Pickett and his men. 

After I made this comparison, a hardcore Tea Partier friend of mine made a comment about how they should just let the government stay shut down and save the taxpayers a few trillion dollars. Which was so short-sighted and lacking in factual basis, he needed to be educated aggressively. Which I did. 

This won't save anybody trillions. 'Discretionary spending', the portion of the government funding that will be affected by the shutdown, in 2011 (the quickest figures I could find at CBO's site) was $1.3 trillion, which was 36% of the total budget. But since Congress already passed a resolution to continue funding defense, that cuts another $700 billion off the affected number. So you're down to roughly $600 billion at stake, or 16.7%. But even then, you're still not to the real number, because then you have to add back the 'essential' workers within State, VA, Treasury, DOJ, Intelligence, etc. This means that IF they kept up this charade for a full year, really they might save $300-$400 billion (wild-assed guess). And those are budget numbers for 2011, which was a far worse budget year than 2013 has been, or than 2014 is projected to be. What's the economic trade-off of removing the spending of 800k workers from the system? And by the way, that 800k figure doesn't even count contractors that the government uses to actually complete a lot of its work. 

No, what this is is a circus stunt by mostly freshman and sophomore congressmen and women who came to DC in 2010/12 with the stated goal of shutting down the government. Take a look at a few sample headlines and their dates:

"Government Shutdown Opposed By Americans in Poll Faulting Cuts." Washington Post, March 2011.
"Republicans Flirt With Another Government Shutdown Threat Over Budget." Daily Kos, March 2012.
"Government Shutdown on the Horizon?" Politico, April 2012.

 They couldn't be happier about their little coup, because for them, the shutdown is the end in itself. Mission accomplished. As such, it is a short-term tactical victory for a sliver of their caucus that won't accomplish any strategic objective, which is what the Tea Party has been about since the beginning. They are less a theory of governance than a barely-intelligible manifestation of emotion. Tea Partiers don't want to govern, they just want to dump tea into the harbor. They're a protest movement in much the same way the OWS movement was a protest. Only they have billionaire backers paying to legitimize them and keep them acting as though they think thoughts.

Meanwhile, back in the Tea Party caucus meeting...

 The way it looks to me, they've been looking for the tactical poison pill that would get the Democrats to dig in their heels hard enough to actually accomplish the shutdown for a couple of years now, as evidenced by their changing goal posts. In the 2011 fight, the headstrong freshmen demanded immediate spending cuts of $100 billion (which leadership later lowered to $61 billion.) Where do they want to cut? Across the board!! Hard to take that low level of thought very seriously. Nobody would be dumb enough to cut that much across the board (he said with a hint of foreshadowing in his voice.) 

In the 2012 fight, they demanded another $19 billion in cuts. But they wanted to be taken seriously, so they decided to only take it from those worthless sinkholes of Democrat profligacy, like transportation, education, and regulation of financial institutions. And just to bolster their Real Americanness, they tried to skim an extra $8 billion from these programs to give to the defense budget.

Then came another chance to shut it down less than a half a year later: the fiscal cliff, in which they did cut straight across the board with the 20% paycut they gave federal workers called the sequestration. They almost had it that time, but they found the Democrats to be too flexible. Exasperated at the lengths they'd gone to only to fall short, these seasoned political veterans asked themselves "What will the president veto at all costs?" Right. His signature piece of legislation that he sacrificed the bulk of his political capital to pass. They finally got it right this time. You may ask why people who hate the government so badly would want to run for office and become part of the government. My suspicion is that they have no desire to improve it. Quite the opposite. They want to be so colossally incompetent that it further erodes peoples' trust in the institution to the point that it collapses. Likely there are a few for whom this means a broader system meltdown and the hastening of Jesus' return, at which time he'll pat them on the head and thank them for screwing it up so bad that only He could clean it up. But it'll be the sinners who burn for it.

My problem with this is the effect it has on government broadly, and the workers in particular, who have chosen that career because they feel it is a noble path to giving service. Tea Partiers might not respect them, but I count many of these public servants as my friends and colleagues. A high percentage are extremely bright and good at doing the job they've been hired to do. If you ask me, they shut down the wrong part of the government. Congress has one job: govern. And they are failing. Furlough them and their staffs without pay. Bar them from coming to work on a volunteer basis. This includes allowing them access to the press corp or anywhere that cameras may be rolling. If they want to continue being circus performers, let them put up a tent in a field somewhere and charge admission to anybody still interested in their antics. Stop allowing them to make decisions that affect the rest of us.