attribution: None Specified
Rep. Randy Neugebauer has a fit.
We continue our year-end roundup of the year in ridiculousness. This year, October was canceled. But only if you were expecting a government paycheck and/or government services, since Congress spent the beginning of the month declaring that they simply weren't going to pay for things anymore, so wounded were they by America's attempts to reform an abominable national health care system.
- House Republicans quickly seized on the one and only, and I do mean only, negative-to-them effect of shutting down the federal government: the closure of several nearby war memorials. This resulted in a series of belligerent congressional snit-fits that child cancer patients and others counting on shuttered federal programs could only dream of.
- Among the more prominent snitters was Rep. Randy Neugebauer, who continued the year's tradition of ensuring America considered all Texas Republicans to be irredeemable assholes by berating a Park Ranger for closing a war monument that Rep. Randy Neugebauer himself voted to close. The best part of the exchange? That would be the multiple bystanders coming to the ranger's defense.
- In case I did not yet mention that closing the war memorials was literally the only goddamn thing any of the government-closing Republicans gave a flying damn about, Republican National Committee person Reince Priebus staged a press conference at the WWII memorial to announce that the party would be willing to pay to reopen the monument. No such luck for the food banks or the child cancer patients, of course.
- Right-wing truckers planned a rolling blockade of Washington D.C.. It panned out as you might expect, which is to say "invisible to the naked eye."
- Rep. Louie Gohmert continued his reign as America's Dumbest Congressman by telling an audience at the Value Voters Summit that Sen. John McCain, a shutdown critic, "supported al Qaeda."
- And Rep. Michele Bachmann declared that we are now in the End Times.
- By mid-month, the government shutdown finally came to an end with the necessary and expected Republican surrender. It ended as it began, with a lot of crazy hard-right nuts saying incredibly stupid things.
- Sarah Palin announced her new book meant to defend Christmas. Defend it from what, you might ask? From having too little Sarah Palin in it, of course.
- North Carolina Republican precinct chair Don Yelton was forced to resign after giving a jaw-droppingly racist interview to The Daily Show.