There seems to be a little disagreement over whether the Democrats did the right thing in helping to bring the government shutdown to an end.
I’d like to go on record as being 100% in favor of ending the shutdown because I believe it was time to end the suffering, or as much suffering as could be ended.
Further, I think Chuck Schumer orchestrated his caucus very carefully so that the deciding votes came to exactly 60, which is the threshold needed to pass.
The results of ending the shutdown are (among other things) that those folks who depend on SNAP for their meals won’t have to go hungry, federal workers will be able to return to their jobs and get paid, folks should be able to fly to their Thanksgiving destinations without more than the usual amount of trouble, and that fucking asshole Mike Johnson finally had to swear in Adelita Grijalva which he’s been holding off doing for weeks and lying about his reasons for doing so.
That last one means that Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) discharge petition for a bill to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein got enough signatures on Wednesday to force action on the matter, which is Johnson’s worst nightmare. Also the worst nightmare of that rapist sitting in the Oval Office. I wonder if he’s having a bad case of the shits yet?
Yes, there was a calculation that the Democrats were never going to get what they wanted on the subsidies, and they were probably right on that. Regardless, I believe they made their point and it was time to end the suffering.
So I agree with people like:
Will Saletan: Sorry, but the Democrats Won the Shutdown
You Got to Know When to Hold ‘Em, Know When to Fold ‘Em
Give Chuck a Break. It Could Have Been Worse
More on the (Imminent?) End of the Shutdown
But I disagree with Rachel Maddow, Ezra Klein, Jon Stewart, and others who lambasted the Democrats.
I used to like Rachel, but she lost a lot of her credibility with me when, during the Obama regime, her show became a bootlicking Obama nightfest, and when I learned that she vetoed the re-hiring of Keith Olbermann, I lost all respect for her completely. I guess she was afraid that with Keith around, she would no longer be queen of the whatever. The hell with her.
Similarly with Ezra. I thought he was intelligent, until he wrote a column defending Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. By that time any self-aware organism should have realized that Musk was a self-aggrandizing nincompoop (to put it politely). The hell with him, too.
Jon is a sadder case. Even during his first run on The Daily Show I noticed signs that he often reached conclusions in too slapdash a fashion. Like the time he initially believed James O’Keefe’s fake video about ACORN. And I think he’s declined since then.
(Methinks, at this rate there soon won’t be any left wing pundits that I give a hoot about.)
I’d just like to quote a bit from Christopher Bates, who teaches history at UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona, and writes under the pseudonym (Z):
If you look at the list of pundits above [Jon Stewart, Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait and Rachel Maddow], the ones who excoriated the Democrats, we doubt you will see the names of anyone who has to worry about where their next meal is coming from. It is obviously much easier to play armchair political chess when you’re dealing with abstractions.
It gets way, way harder when those abstractions become real people. To take an example, Jon Stewart does not need SNAP. The people who work on his show don’t need it. His family doesn’t need it. There’s a good chance that he doesn’t personally know anyone who needs it. By contrast, (Z) has students for whom SNAP benefits make the difference between eating three meals a day and not. It is way harder to say “keep the shutdown going forever, if that is what it takes!” when you don’t have to look folks like that in the face, as politicians have to do. Especially when it’s also the holiday season.
And to be completely clear, I’ll make a full disclosure that although I’ve been receiving my full retirement benefits during this shutdown, I worked for 26 years as a federal government employee in the Defense War Department.
On another subject, I noticed that Christmas trees are already on sale as of November 12. Sigh.
