"When the House takes action today, the United States Senate will have no more excuses for inaction," said Speaker Boehner, just prior to cancelling all essential floor activity for the day. Again.
They did however first rename some post offices, which for the GOP House is a remarkable feat of efficiency, discipline and organization.
Somewhere, Cantor is resharpening his fangs and reloading his venom sac. Well done, Eric. Bye-bye, Boehner.
It could be, John, that all of your weeping and sobbing and blubbering instilled something less than dread of reprisal in your juvenile-delinquent charges. Remember Niccolo's words: "[I]t is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both." And if you never quite got around to reading the classics in political philosophy, surely at some point you've watched Vito exclaim: You can act like a man!
On a more serious note, all of this does bring to mind a fascinating scholarly article I once read on extremist right-wing government and bureaucracy. The author's model was a very well-known one, which for decades since has been grudgingly hailed for its ruthless efficiency (getting the trains to run on time, that sort of thing), so the academic writer/researcher decided to take a thoroughgoing, archival look at the government's actual, day-to-day operations. Turns out, because those in charge were little more than subliterate right-wing goons and gangsters, in reality they ran their government and its assorted bureaucracies very much as one might expect a bunch of subliterate goons and gangsters to run a government and its assorted bureaucracies. Things were a mess: calls not returned, letters not written, orders not given, conscientious follow-ups virtually nonexistent, critical decisions on all manner of exigencies postponed or forgotten -- all leading to a vast organization that teetered incompetently on collapse.
But by God they knew their ideology. It reigned supreme -- right up till its catastrophic, short-lived end.
The self-evident problem? Ideology is unsuitable for actual governance, which is all rather fussy and dull compared to the violent ecstasy of staging a revolution and brashly holding forth on utopian (or dystopian) ideals.