Imminent Shutdown Good for Neither Party–Maybe Good for Us

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I just wanted to comment on this briefly as I was just reading in a WaPo piece by Cillizza how the citizenry probably will just hate on both parties should the shutdown actually happen.

For those of us in opposition this is a golden opportunity to do our little bit to break people out of the hypnotism that the major parties are anything worth supporting–the issues are utterly puzzling to everyone including me and I’m not usually puzzled as much as this by Washington politics–something very strange is going on here.

The American people tend to believe in magical thinking that if they just wish hard enough, say enough affirmations that everything will just be ok. Roll up your sleeves, put on a smile and get to work is the attitude that has gotten us pretty far–but we live in far more complicated times. Part of the reason for this is the extraordinarily poor job the mainstream media is doing in explaining what seem to me to be utterly paradoxical policies nationally and internationally.

One of the things I saw when I investigated the Iraq War was that there were multiple policies being followed at once. Every office of every agency involved in the conflict (and there were far more agencies involved than you think) seemed to have its own policy and then, of course, there were the Brits, particularly its intel services, who were caught with their pants down seemingly trying to plant bombs–much as the CIA operative in Pakistan was perhaps caught up in something not too Kosher. My point is that there is so much going on beneath the service in contemporary politics that is systematically ignored by a press corps that knows that anyone that enters into truly investigative reporting will find him/herself banned for life from their profession. Thus we can not count on any mainstream reporting.

What I’m saying is that we have no idea what the fuck is going on. I suspect it’s some weird arcane power struggle that I certainly can’t see–if anybody has any idea why the two parties have gotten themselves in this ridiculous and humiliating situation please let us know. Unless you know government you don’t know how expensive it is to shut it down–people have been spending weeks preparing and other work has not gotten done. It’s utterly insane and expensive?

Maybe they’ll come to their senses, who knows? If not this could be well the start of the great unraveling we’ve been expecting.