Our yesterday was mostly devoted to preparing today’s speech to the Wichita Pachyderm Club, a weekly gathering of downtown’s Republicans, and the effort left little time to keep abreast of the day’s events. It’s an honor to be asked to address our fellow right-wing lunatics, and we wanted to make sure the oration had a few laugh lines to leaven all of our usual gloominess, so we paid only scant attention to our usual news sources.
What little we did hear was mostly about the crazed woman who attacked the White House and the Capitol, or the ongoing inconveniences caused by the government shutdown and the endless speculation about who is to be blamed, and neither story seemed especially compelling. The crazed woman’s attack and subsequent death are regrettable, of course, but unlikely to be of lasting public significance. Whenever these incidents occur much of the media are breathlessly hoping that the perpetrator will turn out to be some white male “tea party” member with an assault weapon, but in this case it turned out to be an African-American woman dental hygienist armed only with an automobile, which wasn’t even a sport utility vehicle, so we expect the matter will quickly fade away.
The government shutdown will likely be with us for a while, and the blame game will certainly linger even longer, but at this point the latest juicy details are of little importance. We got a good laugh from hearing President Barack Obama boast of how he’s carefully tempered his rhetoric against those suicide-vest-wearing Republicans who are holding a gun to the public’s head because they’re so eager to deny poor people access to health care, but the rest of it was too dreary to distract us from our speech-writing. In several of the radio news snippets the president was also warning that the Republicans would cause the government to default on its debts, an admittedly unpleasant possibility, but we also spent enough time perusing the more complete news outlets to notice that the Republicans’ House leadership has promised to avoid that at any cost including complete capitulation, so we’re not yet ready to panic. Default lies not in the stars, as Cassius might have said to Brutus had they been misfortunate enough to live in these times, but rather in Obama.
The deranged woman who crashed through the Capitol Hill barricades on Thursday isn’t the only crazy person in Washington, it seems, and the rest of them are more likely to do the most lasting damage.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 