@JuddLegum Like Podesta's old line from Clinton White House: If the legislative plan depends on moderate Republicans, get another plan.
— billmon (@billmon1) September 30, 2013
Light entertainment, for the interval. The Huffington Post has video of Troutmouth Bob Woodward, hustling to be on the right side of history:
“Let’s call it what it is, they are trying to blackmail the president and say, ‘Look, we’re going to shut down the government or default on our debt unless you — we go back, rewind the clock, on Obamacare and delay it or somehow cut off the funding,” he said. “You can’t govern that way. It will not work. It will be exposed.”
(Of course, Both Sides Bob immediately pivots to explaining how Obama should be “talking with” the blackmailers, because after fifty years of undercover work it’s not just a pose, it’s a neurological tic.)
Alex MacGillis at TNR profiles one of those lemmings, now occupying George H.W.Bush’s old seat:
When this chapter of the Republican Party’s descent into radicalism is written, the representative quote may go not to Ted Cruz, who managed to say little memorable in his 21-hour talkathon, but to his fellow Texan, Rep. John Culberson. It was Culberson, a seven-term member from Houston, who, recounting how House Republicans voted Saturday to make a delay of Obamacare a condition for funding the government, declared, “The whole room: ‘Let’s vote!’ I said, like 9/11, ‘let’s roll!’”
Yes, in Culberson’s mind, holding hostage the federal government for the sake of denying health insurance to millions of the working poor (a disproportionate share of them Texans) is apparently sorta like heroically attempting to overcome terrorist hijackers armed with boxcutters, as the passengers aboard Flight 93 did on September 11, 2001 after one of them, Todd Beamer, uttered that succinct call to action…
I remember the Teahadist dropping their iconization of the Flight 93 defenders when it turned out one of them was gay, but then, I’m just a DFH cynic…