I haven’t been writing about the impending government shutdown because it’s so depressing. For one thing, since they’ve been playing games with funding for so long, it literally does shut down everything. It’s much worse than when it happened under Clinton — back then, a lot of funding bills were already signed so it wasn’t a total shutdown. This is.
And they’re going to use it as cover for the Grand Bargain. (As Digby says: It doesn’t hurt to be paranoid.) It’s almost inevitable, and Obama handed them the gun to shoot us with. He set up the whole showdown. And this isn’t conjecture — WH economic advisor Gene Sperling admitted as much in a letter to Bob Woodward.
I don’t know how we can fight back. The Congress critters are terrified of extending the shutdown, they’ll grab at the first deal they can live with. And Wall Street will live happily ever after while old people die.
God bless America.
When you stop to look at it, people really are out to get clinical paranoids. My miserable rumination of the day is that if the ACA succeeds, it could be the precursor to privatizing Medicare.