All
well and good for reason-strapped observers, but future and past parodies can’t
match what the Shutdown is doing now. In South Dakota at Mt. Rushmore, those huge stone heads
of Presidents past are averting their eyes as cones are placed on the highway below
to keep tourists from stopping to ogle them. Only a Black Hills blizzard gets
the National Park Service to take them down temporarily.
No
news about the nearby historic saloon in Deadwood where Wild Bill Hickok was
killed holding those famous aces and eights.
Back
in Washington, nobody has a winning hand, but John Boehner refuses to fold,
raising the ante with yet another threat of default if the President doesn’t throw
in his cards.
Call
it Doomsday Liar’s Poker, the ultimate version of insanity in Michael Lewis’
1989 book portraying how greedy, reckless Wall Street morons were inflating the
stock market and heading it toward ruin. Only this time the game is being
played in Washington, and the stakes are the nation’s economy.
Even
some of the players are the same. The New
York Times describes how Tea Party plotters planned the current impasse
with Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese III leading the way. Meese was a bad
apple even back then, who resigned his post after involvement in the Wedtech scandal, a bid-rigging scheme was uncovered by an independent prosecutor. Now
Meese is a “Conservative” icon.
The
infamous Koch brothers are back too, with a group linked to them disbursing
over $200 million dollars for the anti-Obamacare campaign.
Stakes
are enormous now, but at bottom, it’s still the same old Liar’s Poker Game.
Except that this time it will be American taxpayers paying the tab for
generations to come.
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