Ted Cruz: We're Not Shutting Down Government Over Obamacare, Obama Is Shutting Down Government Over Obamacare

The Senate GOP caucus has its dumb, its cranky old man yelling at clouds,   its closeted Scarlett O’Hara impersonator, and its Tortugan wildlife. To this menagerie of dickitude the wise voters of Texas have recently added a condescending, particularly malevolent evil asshole in the form of Ted Cruz (R-Asshat Harbour). But now someone is going to have to persuade us that Cruz is not either Andy Kaufman in a skin-suit made of Canadian bacon and derp, or a fifth columnist sent here by our northern neighbors to finish off our decaying empire from within.

Let us set the scene so that if we are wrong you can yell at us in the comments: when the next fiscal year begins on October 1 Congress will have to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and running. Not long ago Cruz signed onto a plan by Senator Mike Lee to refuse to vote for any continuing resolution that includes funding for Obamacare. Should the resolution not pass, the government shuts down, a plan of action that has worked so well for the GOP in the past that even Tom Coburn thinks this is an addlepated stunt of pure fuckery. 

Ah, but Ted Cruz has the counter-argument here, and yesterday during a Q & A at The Heritage Foundation the beady-eyed cock-monkey squirted his world-class logic all over the GOP’s next great plan to stop the socialist menace of affordable health insurance for all:

“The next step will be that President Obama and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid will scream and yell, ‘Why are those mean and nasty Republicans threatening to shut down the government over Obamacare?’” he continued. “And at that point, we’ve actually got to stand up and fight.”

“We’ve got to stand up and make the argument and win the argument that, ‘No, that’s not true. We have voted to fund the federal government. We want to fund the federal government. Why is President Obama threatening to shut down the federal government? Because he wants force (sic) Obamacare down people’s throats.’”

In other words, we’re funding the government, just not a large part of it that we don’t like but that we have been unable to shut down through every legislative channel open to us! Also Obama, why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself, President Obama!

Cruz added that this is “the only strategy I can think of that will work,” by which he means it is the only strategy he has left, what with every other strategy up to and including getting a reactionary, right-wing Supreme Court to rule on the ACA has failed.

What else did we learn during our spin through the logic center of Ted Cruz’s brain? Well, Ted doesn’t think much of polls because they can be used as “tools of advocacy” and he can thus ignore them when they tell him something he does not want to hear. Also, Ted does not understand the whole concept of federal employees being “people” who rely on their “paychecks” to “survive by purchasing goods and services.” How else to explain his vision of the federal government as some sort of sentient life-form that already takes a nap every few days anyway without the planet spinning out of its orbit into the sun?

He pointed to the government shutdown of 1995 as example: “Number one, the world didn’t end. Planes didn’t fall out of the sky, Social Security checks didn’t stop, military paychecks didn’t stop, we didn’t default on our national debt. What happened was that non-essential government services were temporarily suspended while the [continuing resolution] expired. Now, that happens every single week on the weekend. On Saturdays and Sundays, we see temporary partial government shutdowns and the world doesn’t end.”

Like many of you, Yr Wonkette had an up-close-and-personal experience with the great shutdown of 1995. Our dad was and is employed by the federal government in what would be termed “non-essential services.” Maybe the Canadian anchor baby was in a poutine coma at the time, but our recollection is that Dad was furloughed for several weekswithout a paycheck,leaving Mom as the sole breadwinner at a time when both the kids were attending college, which was expensive enough in 1995 and nowadays has reached astronomical levels of fiduciary insanity (while wages have stagnated further and unemployment is high). And it was not as if Dad could decide that the furlough would be a good time to take an Australian vacation or take up golf because those things cost money, and no one knew how long it would take Newt Gingrich’s wounded fee-fees to heal over his infamous Air Force One snub, thus allowing hundreds of thousands of government employees to start earning paychecks again.

It is not quiiiiite the same thing as the government shutting down every weekend, because likeany mostsome private-sector employees, Dad does get weekends off. With pay! But we’re sure our family and all the other families will happily make the sacrifice so that a duly passed law will not be shoved down our throats. Thanks, Ted! Oh, you may want to check with the Congressional Research Service, which has detected a major flaw in your super-evil-genius plan.

Ted Cruz is either this genuinely stupid, or he is knowingly playing the Republican base for fools for the eleventy billionth time. Either way, he is giving us a migraine, for which we’ll seek medical attention as soon as we can get insurance through Obamacare…oh.

[ Raw Story ]