Shutdown Is Bad

Just for the record, I'm am against a government shutdown.  I basically quit the government by retiring from the Foreign Service after the 1995-6 government shutdown.  I blame the Republicans.  I blamed Newt Gingrich and his Republican followers for the first shutdown, and I blame the Tea Party Republicans for this shutdown, if it happens.  The government should go about its business in a business-like way.  People say one test of a business is whether it can meet a payroll.  The Republicans can't do it.  For all of Boehner's talk about growing up as a small businessman in his father's bar, he is on the brink of being a failure as a businessman on a much bigger stage.

The government should honor its commitments.  If it is over committed, which it is, then it should have a debate about how to revise its commitments, but it should do that prospectively, not by refusing to pay people who have relied on it.  Presumably, the failure to raise the debt ceiling in about two weeks might be worse financially, but morally the two failures are more or less equivalent.  The US has lost its integrity.

I think that Newt consigned the US to the status of a second (or third) class country when he shut the government down.  These are not serious people, and if they run the government, this is not a serious government.  In the Foreign Service, I felt that the government abandoned me in Warsaw, Poland.  It seems possible that it may now abandon troops in the field.  In my opinion, the Republicans are largely unpatriotic cowards.  Most of them never served in the military, never fought for this country, although they are quick to send other people off to die for America.  John McCain is more or less the exception that proves the rule.

Right now, I hear former Republican Senator Fred Thomson selling reverse mortgages to old people on the TV.  What a disgrace!  He is typical of the low class of people who have become politicians in America, and who are now on the verge of shutting down the government and showing the world what a laughingstock America is.