No it's not funny, but yes this, from Politico, is hilarious:
Boehner, who also faces in coming weeks an even more daunting battle with Obama and Reid over raising the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling, may need a shutdown now in order to reassert control over his members and cool their passion for a winner-takes-all showdown with Democrats.
Parliamentary Psychiatric inquiry, please, or rather a point of clarification ...
A shutdown, if not a default, is precisely what Boehner's barnburners have been itching for, because the barnburners are, as their moniker implies, insanely hellbent on a nihilistic cataclysm. Thus a nihilistic shutdown--prelude to a cataclysmic default--might somehow "cool their passion" for precisely that which they're aiming for?
Later in the Politico piece, their dissociative madness is acknowledged:
On conference calls and in conversations on the House floor, many conservatives say they need a shock to the political system to have a chance of extracting something from Obama. This isn’t a government shutdown, they say, but rather a slowdown. They are betting the American public won’t turn on House Republicans like they did in 1996.
Note the intensity of their epistemic closure, so common to fanatics--"On conference calls and in [internal] conversations on the House floor"; their fundamental inability to focus on any serious objective, so common to the scrambled thoughts of the disordered mind--to "extract" something from Obama; and their primal emphasis on political fallout as opposed to crippling national wounds, so common to purely self-concerned sociopaths--"They are betting the American public won’t turn on House Republicans."
Elements of reason are presumed capable of penetrating all that? Evidence of destruction will somehow dissuade those set on destruction? Chaos won't simply make their day?
No, for Boehner there's only one way out of their nuthatch:
Either [today], or a few days after the government shuts down, enough House Republicans--somewhere around 120 members--could go to the leadership to ask for a clean CR.
The aforementioned "could," I'd wager, is at this moment descending in the form of a must--from the speaker.