Sean Duffy is from Wisconsin. Sean Duffy is 40 years old. Sean Duffy is married; he has sired six children. Sean Duffy was a county prosecutor for eight years. Since January 2011 Sean Duffy has served as a freshman Republican in the U.S. House. And this, according to the NY Times, is what Sean Duffy, after 40 years of life -- 10 of them in public service -- has learned about the American political system:
[W]hat I’ve come to realize is that in divided government you don’t always get what you want.
It seems incomprehensible that Duffy's congressional constituents failed to notice, back in 2010, what surely must have been the many other signs of his astonishing slowness on the uptake; what most schoolchildren learn in civics class required Duffy's (equally astonishing) election to the United States Congress.
So let us comfort ourselves this holiday season in the recuperative knowledge that the 112th Congress perhaps isn't so much systemically dysfunctional as it is just plain stupid. For stupid can be remedied.