With shutdown looming, GOP's comic-book villains push America to the abyss

Every two weeks or so, some scientific journal publishes a new article that implies our reality might just be a computer simulation or a game on some galactic laptop.

Increasingly, those articles coincide with the latest news of some politician getting caught performing soft porn during a theater production of "Beetlejuice," or an article about the nuclear threat from Russia, now bolstered by an alliance with North Korea. Meanwhile, humans seem to be "mutilating" the tree of life, according to some scientists, while climate change is threatening extinction.

Our villains, and our narrative, seem taken straight from comic books, and our politicians out of Mad magazine. If we live in a computer simulation, it needs better writers. This is definitely beginning to look like a "Chuck" situation straight from "Supernatural."

In the latest edition of the human comic book, Congress appears ready to shut down the federal government as the GOP has splintered into at least three factions: the moderates, the Freedom Caucus crazies and the Matt Gaetz lunatics. I think uniforms and T-shirts would be a nice touch — just so we can readily identify them before they open their mouth and spew excrement. I hear some of them love brown shirts.

Meanwhile, the inoperative GOP House majority has been called a "clown show" and dysfunctional by some of its own members. Not only have Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his anarchic harassers turned the House into a dustbin of despair, they are also helping to destroy the military, the economy and our democracy. 

On Tuesday, Republican conservatives sank a procedural vote on Pentagon funding that wasn't just a setback for McCarthy but also, combined with Sen. Tommy Tuberville's wooden-eared refusal to authorize military appointments, a direct threat to national security.

The conservatives don't care. Their cartoon villainy is about getting what they want and getting retribution against those who stand in their way. Some want to oust speaker McCarthy. He challenged them to try. The Democrats — who aren't nearly as fractured and could theoretically help out McCarthy on a floor vote — are in no mood to aid the speaker after he backed an inquiry into a presidential impeachment. Watching the GOP crash and burn is not only hilarious for some Democrats, but a small measure of justice for the way Republicans have run the House.

The upshot is that Congress has less than two weeks to extend government funding past Sept. 30 or risk a shutdown. And it all rests on the slender shoulders and in the soft, frail hands of the Republican Party.

A shutdown would mean furloughs for federal workers who provide basic services, unpaid troops and potential severe damage to the economy. Of course, while the Republicans stand on their soapbox in a child's sandbox, looking like toddlers who've soiled their pull-ups, they also risk annoying and angering voters heading into the 2024 general election.

To the typically self-serving Republicans, it should be obvious their latest move is tantamount to political suicide. The bigger question is how these morons get into office — and why we keep them there. George Carlin famously mused that perhaps our government sucks because we do: Garbage in and garbage out. 

For some who love to bite their nails and wail continuously, things have never been worse and we've reached a low point unparalleled in the cartoon annals of American history.

Let's stop right there. This isn't unprecedented, nor is it unparalleled. The House of Representatives and the Senate, historically speaking, have always been shitshows. Long before Jim Jordan made an ass of himself on a daily basis, before Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, James Comer or a host of other mentally deficient reprobates dragged their knuckles or oozed through the halls of Congress, there were so many lunatics that calm, rational thinking appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Mitch McConnell staring blankly into space is an improvement on some of the things that have happened in Congress.

In the beginning: On Feb. 15, 1798, Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont (a member of the Democratic-Republican Party), who two weeks earlier had spit tobacco juice in the face of Rep. Roger Griswold of Connecticut, earning the name "Spitting Lyon" for that, was assaulted by Griswold with a wooden cane. Lyon grabbed a pair of fireplace tongs and the two went at it until other members of Congress dragged Griswold out by his legs. That's an image straight out of "Carnage" or "Venom." 

During debates on the Compromise of 1850 concerning the expansion of slavery,  Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri charged Sen. Henry S. Foote of Mississippi on the Senate floor. Foote drew his pistol and pointed it at Benton, who reportedly shouted, "Let him fire! Let the assassin fire!" Other senators wrestled Foote to the floor, took the pistol and locked it away in a desk drawer. It's almost like Bruce Wayne's Batman origin story.

On May 19, 1856, Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, a Republican who was passionately anti-slavery, rose to speak against Kansas joining the Union as a slave state. He called slavery a "harlot," accusing Sen. Andrew Butler, a South Carolina Democrat, of taking it as a mistress. On May 22, minutes after the Senate adjourned, Rep. Preston Brooks, another South Carolinian, assaulted Sumner, beating him unconscious and bloody with a metal-tipped cane. Maybe that was an inspiration for "The Avengers," or a Tarantino movie?

One of the most comical events occurred on Feb. 5, 1858, when Democrat Laurence M. Keitt attacked Republican Galusha Grow after an insult-laden verbal exchange about slavery in the House chambers. Keitt grabbed Grow's throat and a brawl involving nearly 50 members erupted. It only ended when one House member missed a punch and upended the hairpiece of Rep. William Barksdale. He was embarrassed and replaced the wig backward, causing both sides to erupt in laughter. It's like "Loki," "Joker" or a scene from Marjorie Taylor Greene's Christmas party.

Then, on Dec. 29, 1859, North Carolina Rep. Lawrence O'Bryan Branch challenged Grow to a duel after the two exchanged insults on the House floor. Both men and their seconds were arrested by Washington police before the duel could take place. Maybe that's a storyline for the Justice League?

Think racist actions are something new and unusual? In 1939, Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi asked for $250 million to deport all African Americans in the United States to Liberia. His inspiration was the "new" Nazi regime in Germany. "Germans appreciate the importance of race values. They understand that racial improvement is the greatest asset that any country can have," Bilbo said. He also filibustered an anti-lynching bill. There's a "Captain America" storyline for you — or one of Magneto's schemes.

As House Republican conference chair, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio literally handed out campaign checks from tobacco PACs on the House floor. Writing in the New York Times in October 2010, Bob Herbert said Boehner was "one of the especially sleazy figures in a capital seething with sleaze." He later became House speaker. Maybe the tobacco money helped. That is a villain scene from just about every comic book ever written .

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To finally deal with Tuberville's nonsense in holding up military appointments, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Wednesday for a vote that would supersede Tuberville's blockage of such major appointments as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Marine Corps commandant and the Army chief of staff. 

"This move is good in the interim," a National Security Council spokesman said Wednesday. "But it ain't good enough for national security and doesn't solve the larger problem." Current estimates suggest that if a vote had to be held on every individual appointment, it would take several hundred hours to push them all through. OK, that's not a comic book twist. Suddenly I'm thinking of "Veep."

The cartoon villains in the GOP are still intent on delaying military appointments or, as Jim Jordan showed in a committee hearing Wednesday, eager to deflect from the GOP's inaction by attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland over the federal investigations into Donald Trump and Hunter Biden.

That prompted an unusually quick response from the Biden White House, which said in a press release that Republicans "want to distract from the reality that their own chaos and inability to govern is going to shut down the government in a matter of days, hurting our economy and national security and jeopardizing everything from troop pay to fighting fentanyl. ... House Republicans should drop these silly political Washington games and actually do their job to prevent a government shutdown." 

At the end of the day the cartoon antics in Congress — not just now, but over the last two centuries and more — have caused so much disillusionment among generations of Americans that children are born  thinking that government is useless. You can't entirely blame them: It all seems like badly written fiction, acted by Z-listers who dress poorly, act pathetically and perform like drunken zombies. 

Maybe this is the best we can do. When you take away education and create a society where not only do both parents have to work, both have to have side hustles just to afford to live from paycheck to paycheck, you end up with this: a dysfunctional, delusional, disillusioned, divided and defiant electorate.

That's America. 

Carlin was right: Garbage in and garbage out. 

Speaking of the potential shutdown, the NSC spokesman said, "It's just not the way a power like the United States should be behaving. There should be no reason for a shutdown. It's being driven by extremists on the right."

If we really are in a computer simulation, we can still take some responsibility for our ludicrous actions.  If we're not, the answer is no different: We need to do better, and we can. That remains Joe Biden's central theme in most of his stump speeches, which few people listen to.

Either way, our fate is still our own, and if we manage to take responsibility for it and banish the cartoon characters back to our imaginations where they belong, we might actually get something done.

Otherwise Republicans will continue crafting their farcical script. And it's obvious it won't get any better. Republicans can't write.