How many times has this happened now?
I'm talking about the eleventh-hour deal. The midnight-oil collapse of resistance. The race to the brink, only to stop an inch from the edge. The doomsday device timer that won't stop with more than one second to spare.
I'm getting f*cking tired of this routine. It's idiotic. Our Congress is not capable of evaluating a proposal and voting on it based on merit.
Noooo, that would make too much sense. Instead, they have to bicker, and posture, and make obviously insincere pronouncements ("I will never vote for this horrible, world-ending, pig-stealing travesty of a bill!!!"), until one second before the drop-dead deadline, then enough representatives cave to give it a simple or super majority, depending on what the bill requires.
It starts with an (accurate) prediction of how it will end -- accurate enough of the time to make one think everybody actually knew the outcome in advance. Then, for the next 24-72 hours (depending on how much time is left) everybody postures. Finally, moments before it's too late, a vote is taken and the predicted outcome happens.
It starts all:
And ends all:
Look, this is an idiotic way to govern. The greatest nation on earth? Our Congress couldn't govern a Brownie Scout troop!
This should have been settled a month ago. OK, wait until after the election. That actually makes sense. Find out what the voters want.
OK, it's a major issue and deserves a full debate. Take a month, guys. No problem.
But come the end of November, if everyone was playing for real, it should have been settled.
What we watched for the month of December was absolutely nothing but theater. It was designed to convince us that our individual representatives were fighting tooth and nail for us.
But in fact, everybody knew how it was going to come out. $250,000? $400,000? There isn't enough real difference between those two figures in practice to make the distinction worth more than half an hour's debate.
It's a fraud. The whole process is a fraud.
And I'm sick of it.