Lawless in DC

This is as close as I come to live-blogging.

As a black car drives wildly through Washington during a crisis of lawlessness in Congress, all eyes turn from the Shutdown to what looks like a shootout in the Capital.

Switching cable channels, CNN seems chastened by Jon Stewart’s takedown during the last massacre and cautiously keeps referring to the driver as the “suspect,” but for at least an hour and a half MSNBC keeps running crawls about a “gunman,” “shooter” and “female gunman” with no evidence whatsoever that anyone other than law enforcement has been firing weapons.

Finally comes the fortuitous tape of the car chase (in Arabic, no less) with police aiming at the vehicle before it starts up again and speeds off. They are pointing guns at the driver, but when the car starts up again, not one has the presence of mind to shoot out the tires.

The babble will go on for hours, as Eric Cantor takes to the House floor to thank those forces of law and order that he and his cronies have been doing their best to defund.

With a little girl in the car and a woman driver, it’s all likely to turn out to be about mental distress, drugs or alcohol or all of the above. But the way things are in Washington now, the car chase is a brief respite from the main lawlessness there.

Stay tuned as the normal madness resumes.
 

Update: The driver turns out to be a dental hygienist who works in Connecticut prisons. In days to come, we will learn more about why Miriam Carey, unarmed, drove a Lexus so wildly through the streets of the nation’s capital and met her death there.

What was in her apparently disordered mind that led her to careen a car through the jumpy streets from the White House to Capitol Hill? In coming days, we will learn more about her inner life so that we can understand more about her than we do about the people who work there. Her small tragedy will be only a metaphor for the larger one being played out in Congress.