While Republican presidential candidates are promising an American paradise once they're in office, Republican congressfolk, already there, are "tee[ing] up a hellish final few months of 2015," observes Politico.
The story isn't a news story in the traditional sense of news and reporting; it's more of a reminder that the beast always stalks. The old Will Rogers line that America is safest when Congress is recessed is no longer valid: Whether at home or in Washington, GOP congressvores thrive perpetually on an inhuman diet of savage calamities, old obstructions and fresh imbecilities.
There is no refuge from the beast, for the beast is us. We not only put it there, in both houses, it is our representative "voice." Loud, abrasive, triumphantly dysfunctional Trumpism doesn't threaten us in some wickedly anticipatory way. It's been devouring the nation since 2011.
And we're in for a real beast-feast this fall.
"After the monthlong August recess" — throughout which, in district after district and state after state, Iran will unmistakably transmogrify into Nazi Germany and the Joker will be unmasked as Neville Chamberlain — "Congress will have just 12 workdays in September to avert a government shutdown on Oct. 1," Politico reminds us. Before year's end, "highway funding is set to expire — again," since mindless beasts are rather poor planners. Also coming will be another chest-pounding feeding over the abused carcass of the Export-Import Bank.
Then, just to top it all off, we'll witness the monstrous horror of "a GOP-led Capitol" confronting a debt ceiling.
Ask 300 monkeys to transcribe Hamlet and in three billion years they might get it right; alas that's a more sanguine expectation than asking 300 Republican pols to comprehend invoices due from bills they helped to rack up. They sit, pawing at the thing, this debt-ceiling thing, in utter mystification. What is it? Is it alive, can we kill it, can we eat it? Christ. Even unpeeled-banana-eating monkeys understand this one.
North Dakota's Sen. Heidi Heitkamp says of the GOP grotto, where the wild things are: "This place boggles my mind every single day." It's a wonder she has one left. Aside from their regular diet of calamities and obstructions and imbecilities, Republicans eat brains, too.