It’s Thursday, October 3rd, 2013…but before we begin, two headlines highlighting the hypocrisy inherent in the government “shutdown”:

Shutdown Grounds Sports at Service Academies: Navy-Air Force Football Game Cancelled

Are The White House Chefs “Essential”?

And need we ask whether The Obamao will let the “shutdown” prevent him golfing twice this weekend?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the Thursday edition, two views of what, particularly in light of Speaker Boner’s leaked emails regarding a backroom deal for continued congressional exemptions, we deem the GOP’s hamfisted handling of what should have been another nail in The Obamao’s coffin.

First up, courtesy of the WaPo via the AEI, Marc Thiessen details what he terms Republican’s big mistake:

The GOP flunks Hostage-Taking 101

“Oops…did I do that?!?”

“…The Democrats are following Napoleon’s old adage: Never interfere when your enemy is in the process of destroying himself.

…With a shutdown, Republicans are essentially putting a gun to their own heads and threatening to pull the trigger if the Democrats don’t capitulate. Not surprisingly, it’s not working. Some congressional Republicans can’t seem to get it though their heads: When it comes to a government shutdown they . . . have . . . no . . . leverage. By contrast, when it comes to the debt-limit showdown, they do have leverage; while Obama can let the government close and blame the GOP, he cannot allow the United States to default.”

Cruz’s truly hopeless crusade against common sense brings to mind this scene from Blazing Saddles:

Yes, Ted and the rest of The Gang Who Once Again Failed to Shoot Straight inexplicably failed to grasp (a) like Medicare and Social Security, the Unaffordable Care Act cannot simply be defunded, (b) no matter how pure their position, the MSM will never support them, (c) the White House has all the leverage in a government shutdown, and (d) see (a) – (c).  Which puts The Obamao in the role of Cleavon Little.

Second, the WSJ suggests a way out of the morass:

A GOP Shutdown Strategy

How to navigate between the ‘defunders’ and Barack Obama.

“…the truth is that Mr. Obama and the GOP’s own “defund ObamaCare” caucus have put Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans in a difficult spot. If they now surrender empty-handed, their Ted Cruz faction will denounce them as sellouts. But the longer they hold out for compromise from an AWOL President, the more chances increase that the public will turn against GOP governance.

We opposed this shutdown strategy precisely because the congressional math made this box canyon so clearly inevitable. But now that it’s here, the question is what Republicans can do to navigate an honorable exit that accomplishes some of their goals.”

Again, keep in mind, defunding WAS NEVER POSSIBLE, though all the while the Republicans held the ultimate trump card…

…yet never played it ’til the hand was over!

But all may not be as dark as it seems, at least according to Ed Rogers writing at the WaPo, who suggests, unconvincingly to our mind…

The government shutdown isn’t the end of the world for the GOP

Regardless of how we got here, the shutdown of 2013 is upon us. The Republicans should not blink now. Using the budget to try to stop an unpopular, destructive, disorganized, partisan law is no vice. Yes, it would be preferable to not be in this position. But there is still an important point to be made and some good that can be done.

‎Even though the Democrats and many in the mainstream media would have you believe that the shutdown was caused by Republicans’ anarchic insanity or psychotic compulsion, Republicans stand ready to fund 99.9 percent of the government. (We whole-heartedlyl agree; but if the MSM refuses to report it, how will the low-information/uninformed voter ever know?!?) They also have reasonably offered to negotiate the future of the train wreck that is Obamacare.

There is no real legislative process under President Obama. He doesn’t have the skill set to facilitate a normal budget process or any other bipartisan legislation, and he remains ideologically committed to dogmatic positions. (Again, true and true; so what?!?) Under this president, how can you get anything done in Washington except through brinkmanship and budget and debt-deadline dramas? After all, that is how the Democrats passed Obamacare in the first place. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared it was a budget issue and so did not need to proceed through regular order. But that’s ancient history.

‎

At this point, Republicans in Congress should be Clinton-esque: keep talking and look active. They should present ideas and make sensible offers for compromise in public and in private. Republicans can’t change every mind, but they don’t have to. GOP leaders need to show themselves to be patient, thoughtful advocates of their position. More voters appreciate the reality of what is happening than the talking heads inside the beltway would have you believe. (That’s what we thought in 2012!)

But at the end of the day, Republicans don’t have the votes they need in the Senate — and those votes are not going to suddenly appear. (So why did we do this in the first place?!?) There is no cavalry coming, and I give the shutdown a week at most‎. But the fight over Obamacare is not over.  Regardless of what happens with this round, everyone is going to live to fight another day.

Next, courtesy of The Washington Free Beacon., Ellison Barber relates why the GOP never should have started down Shutdown Road…

Ellison’s Must Read of the Day

My must-read is “Countdown to Shutdown; Think 1996 was bad for the GOP? This time will be much, much worse,” by Noam Scheiber in the New Republic.

Scheiber writes:

There is, of course, much to be said for the 1996 analogy given that it’s our most recent example. But I’d argue that the more relevant case study is the payroll tax fight of late 2011, which involved the same players as today, the same internecine Republican dynamics (Tea Partiers versus Speaker John Boehner and a number of Senate Republicans), and the same media environment. The bad news for Republicans is that 2011 was every bit the rout 1996 was—arguably much more so. Republicans were able to hold out for a respectable 21 days back then. The 2011 fight was over in 48 hours.

The part I was interested in Scheiber’s piece was whether or not the GOP members leading this charge will actually stick to their guns, as they did in 1996 or fold like 2011. If they fold like 2011, then this entire thing was as useless as Obama’s symbolic congressional authorization bit for intervening in Syria.

I don’t think there should be a shutdown. I think it’s high risk and low gain because even if the House and Senate passed a bill defunding the ACA the president would never sign it. But right now Republicans are in a good position to take back the Senate, and for the broader party goals, it isn’t worth possibly losing in those purple-ish states.

If they’re going to do it, tying it to the debt-ceiling makes more sense to me because that vote needs a super-majority, so Senate Dems need to compromise a little.

Not to mention The Dear Misleader, whose hand has already been forced once over the debt-ceiling, albeit not nearly as strongly as it should or could have been.

In a related item, this editorial from the Washington Examiner confirms why Cruz & Company were always tilting at windmills:

Traditional media let Obama stonewall and taunt GOP

Only in the Obama era are the guys who say they will negotiate criticized as blind ideological zealots, while those who repeatedly and acidly refuse to negotiate are hailed as heroes. That is exactly what has been happening as Washington headed into shutdown mode. Consider events just since Sunday’s round of television news interviews. On “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace,” House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California said, “We will not shut the government down. If we need to negotiate a little longer, we will negotiate.”

McCarthy was describing what he expected would happen in the likely event the Senate Democratic majority rejected a continuing resolution approved by the House that funded the government through Dec. 15 while delaying Obamacare for a year and killing the health care reform program’s medical device tax. House GOPers could then pass the same CR again, McCarthy said, but make it effective for only a few days to give negotiators between the Senate and House additional time to work out their differences.

The response from leading Democrats essentially was “Hell, no!” And it was followed by another deluge of vicious attacks on the GOP, much like one last week by a key White House aide comparing House Republicans to terrorists and suicide bombers. “What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest,” said Obama aide Dan Pfieffer. Republican offers of alternative approaches in discussions about the CR and debt limit were nothing more than “ransom demands,” Pfieffer charged, adding that “it’s not a negotiation if I show up at your house and say, ‘Give me everything inside or I’m going to burn it down.’” There is no public evidence that Obama rejected such inflammatory rhetoric by one of his closest advisers.

No surprise there. After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama again vowed to reporters that there would be no Obamacare negotiations. He added that he would be happy to talk about a long-term spending plan once the present budget crises are resolved, yet he just couldn’t resist trashing the Republicans yet again: “But the only way to do that is for everybody to sit down in good faith without threatening to harm women and veterans and children with a government shutdown.”

Reporters give Obama a free pass on his repeated refusals to negotiate and his viciously partisan insults, which have accomplished nothing except to further poison the nation’s political dialogue and encourage Republican hard-liners to respond in kind. That fact highlights the two reasons Obama and his Democratic allies do these things without fear: First, they imagine that, as happened in 1995, they win politically with a government shutdown, so why try to avoid one? Second, they know their pals in the traditional media will never call them for politicizing the debate.

Next up, James Taranto, in stark contrast to every voice on the Left and in the MSM (which for all practical purposes are one in the same), makes…

The Case Against Hope

May ObamaCare fail quickly and spectacularly.

Some people hate ObamaCare, others love it (at least in theory). Then there’s the Washington Post. The Post kinda likes it but recognizes that there is a range of legitimate opinion, including “fair-minded critics on the left,” who kinda dislike it “because they would prefer a single-payer system,” and even “fair-minded critics on the right,” who kinda dislike it “because it devotes federal money to pay for health care rather than to paying down the debt, or because they don’t like the idea of the government requiring people to buy insurance.”

But the Post deplores “unreasonable critics,” those with the “loudest voices”–namely “unions that object to the end of government subsidies” and “demagogues, such as Sen. Ted Cruz,” who disagree with “most economists” as to the likely consequences of the new plan.

In its headline, the Post puts forth an emotional mandate: “Everyone Should Hope ObamaCare Works.” The argument is as follows:

Apart from GOP obstructionism, the biggest threat to Obamacare may be the still-distinct possibility that not enough people will buy insurance, even with government help. If only the oldest and sickest enter the new insurance system, costs to the government and to customers who don’t get government subsidies could be higher than estimated. . . .

As with any big rollout, there will no doubt be problems, many of them mundane. Computer systems will not work perfectly. Some people might have to sign up over the phone or on paper. But everyone should hope that those sorts of problems–and the overheated rhetoric of critics–do not deter too many people from buying insurance. Many Americans’ health depends on it.

This column vigorously disagrees. We resent being told how to feel, and we hope ObamaCare fails, spectacularly and quickly.

We hope it fails spectacularly because that would provide an emotionally satisfying dramatic conclusion. If Barack Obama is forced to spend, say, the last two years of his presidency contending with the undeniable failure of his signature initiative, that would be a fitting punishment for the hubris of his first two years, especially since the imposition of ObamaCare on an unwilling country was the main consequence of his hubris.

We hope it fails quickly for an additional reason: to minimize the damage. Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled “Everyone Should Hope Communism Works.” That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn’t work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.

Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. The Post might respond that that’s an argument against communism rather than an argument against hoping communism works. But when you put it that way, it’s not such a clear distinction, is it? The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.

Hope, in other words, poses a moral hazard: It can be a species of pathological altruism. And consider the perversity of the Post’s logic as applied to the dramatic arc of Soviet communism: By the editorialists’ reckoning, those of us who cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall were heartless boors indulging in Schadenfreude.

The case for hoping ObamaCare “works” is unpersuasive even on the narrow grounds upon which the Post rests it, namely that if it fails because young, healthy people don’t sign up, the people “whose health depends on it” will suffer.

To hope that ObamaCare helps the latter group is also to hope that the young get bamboozled into buying insurance that is vastly overpriced relative to their risk profile. One may argue that deceiving the young is a lesser evil than refraining from helping the old and sick. But the Post does not acknowledge that trade-off.

That is, it fails to admit that ObamaCare cannot “work” unless it is massively successful in deceiving Americans who have done nothing wrong other than to be young at the wrong time. When you think about it from that angle, hoping ObamaCare “works” sounds a lot more cynical than high-minded.

And in today’s Money Quote, Balls Cotton forwarded Vladimir Putin’s probable off-the-record opinion of his hopelessly outmatched opponent:

“Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game.“

“Hasta la vista, Barry!”

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a day with Great Moments in American Jurisprudence, and this questionable bit of legal thinking:

Judge refuses to block Maryland’s gun law; opponents vow continue fighting

A federal judge on Tuesday refused to block implementation of Maryland’s new gun control law, citing the late date of the challenge — just two business days before it was set to take effect — as an indication the law posed no imminent threat to core Second Amendment rights. U.S District Judge Catherine Blake’s refusal to grant emergency relief allowed Maryland to implement some of the nation’s toughest firearm restrictions Tuesday.

Blake said that if the threat to Second Amendment rights was so dire, the plaintiffs could have spoken up much sooner. “It seems to me that plaintiffs have known for months that the law would take effect Oct. 1,” she said.

We never knew our Second Amendment protections had a shelf life.  Besides, Blake should have given the plaintiffs a break; they’d most certainly have filed their suit sooner, but they’ve tied up buying guns, ammo and magazines!

Magoo