Analogy Fail: Republican Rep. Compares Shutdown Fight To Gettysburg

An unnamed Republican congressman explained Thursday that the government shutdown was a whole lot like the Battle of Gettysburg:  

"I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn't intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it," the congressman said. "That's basically what's happening now in a political sense. This isn't exactly the fight I think Republicans wanted to have, certainly that the leadership wanted to have, but it's the fight that's here."

Hmmm... we're sure that military history buffs in our readership could probably find far more apt historical comparisons.

Also, about that "looking for shoes" comparison -- that really seems to imply that the hapless House Republicans just sort of blundered into the shutdown, which is certainly at odds with yesterday's  New York Times  reconstruction of events, which documents that the shutdown had been carefully planned. So actually, this appears to be exactly the fight you wanted. Just because the plan didn't go quite so brilliantly as you wanted doesn't mean there wasn't a plan, guys.

And a noisy faction of the Army of Northern Virginia wasn't constantly threatening to replace Robert E. Lee with Nathan Bedford Forest if he didn't make an all-out assault on poor people trying to get health insurance, but now we're not sure how far to push this analogy.

Maybe the GOP should look to another war altogether for its analogies?

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) had this remark for a man who was pressing him to support a clean CR during a visit to the World War II:

“Look, we’re not French. We don’t surrender.”

The guy talking to Sessions retorted, "Surrender what? You created the fight!"

Yeah, smart guy, but when Hitler attacked France with his plan to make people buy health insurance, they... uh...What's the Maginot Line in this, anyway?

Couldn't we try some nice sports analogies instead?

[ TPM / Slate via WaPo ]