Almost unbelievably, Luke Russert just reported on MSNBC that an ultraconservative House member had just told him that he and his fellow irreconcilables see their shutdown-eve, pre-Obamacare-launch shenanigans as another eleventh-hour "Pickett's charge." Judging by Russert's tone, the GOPer said this cheerfully, as though the first Pickett's charge was, oh I dunno, even remotely successful?
The original was, of course, R.E. Lee's dumbest idea of the war. A frontal assault by exhausted troops on an open field in the wake of a woefully ineffectual artillery barrage (largely because the South blasted away perpendicularly--which tended to under- or overshoot the mark--rather than obliquely, which is more likely to hit at least something along the way).
I don't know who first used the term, "unmitigated disaster," but I'd bet whoever it was, he said it with a Southern drawl while looking back on Gettysburg. And yet its tactical roots are what some House GOPers now giddily say they wish to emulate.
Almost unbelievable.