We are governed by outright morons

We are governed by outright morons:

On Tuesday, WIBW, a local CBS affiliate in Topeka, Kansas, aired a segment on how the 5-percent cut in Head Start operations was forcing officials with the organization to make dramatic choices. One program, the station reported, was considering closing a preschool class, in addition to eliminating 20 enrollment spots.

"None of those cuts have to be made there," Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kansas) told the station. "That is a choice by the administration, so we are going to continue to put pressure on the administration. The whole purpose of making a 2-percent cut is for you to carve out waste."

You gigantic dumbass. Sorry; there's just no other way to put it. The entire purpose of "sequestration" was to be cuts enforced without choice. The mechanism was meant to be so abominable that not even the human clusterf--ks that are our current Congress could stomach them; they were meant to be such a severe and absurdist outcome that surely, surely o surely, some group of non-imbicilic representatives would look around in horror, surgically remove the talking points from their lower intestines, and for one brief shining budgetary moment have a negotiation on how government will be funded in the coming few years that was not predicated on simply burning the whole thing down and calling it Freedum. That was the point. No "choice" was involved, or allowed; all the very important government programs would be cut exactly equally, and that would, of necessity, mean that the government would be doing exactly N percent less by definition. This was apparent even to a schoolchild. It was apparent even to media pundits, a class which generally understands slightly less than the average schoolchild. It was apparent even to that groundhog that predicts the weather, and that groundhog wrote his senior thesis on exactly this point—expect publication in the June edition of S--t Even Large Rodents Know Quarterly.

We see now the reason why sequestration was allowed to take place; to people like the esteemed and honorable dumbass from Kansas, it never entered their heads that a cut of N percent in a program for children would result in a cut of N percent of children being served, or an N percent cut in the services being given to those children, or in fact would result in any actual change at all. The notion that government spends that money on Doing Actual Things For Actual People is, apparently, a new f--king revelation—something akin to the discovery of fire. Surely, thought Representative Dumbass, vast and sweeping cuts to government would only result in "waste" being eliminated, where "waste" is always invisible, indefensible nonsense that some other person wants cut?

Of course, the tighter and better run a government program is, the more sequestration is bound to affect them. A government department swimming in corruption and waste would have to trouble at all knocking off a few numbers from an otherwise irrelevant spreadsheet; a lean, responsive program to, say, keep our airplanes in the air or allow poorer children a small amount of help or food or peace would necessarily be punished for that efficiency by having to cut actual bone. Surmising this, however, is predicated on first comprehending that government does actual work for citizens at all, which as we have mentioned is so baffling a proposition that it literally never occurred to people like Rep. Teabagger Von Dumbass during their entire public careers.

All right, so all hope of budget sequestration driving America's moron class, by which I mean our Congress, into more sensible solutions is lost. What we're instead apparently going to do is pass, on a one by one basis, individual bills meant to re-fund each and every part of government in the order constituents get pissed off about them. Air travel was the first, because Congress rides airplanes. Treatment for cancer patients is another first-class one, since even the stupidest people in America know that people will get mad at them for literally taking away treatment for freaking cancer patients. Programs for children in need may also get "pressure put on them," since the various constituents of the various Representative Dumbasses around the country appear to be somewhat taken aback by Congress screwing children, and this unforeseen consequence of screwing children has now, thanks to local news programming decisions, dawned on even the dullest of them.

So far, Congress is mostly shuffling money around. To pay for getting air traffic controllers back, future air traffic infrastructure will suffer, and we will deal with that in turn only when some other poor sap notices the damage done by that, separately, probably about a year or two after it's become obvious to everyone else on the planet. We are setting up a situation in which Congress will valiantly pass a few tens of thousands of individual bills, in the coming years, all shuffling money from one program to the next in accordance with whose constituents are currently most pissed off and whose constituents are still too dumb to know they should be pissed off, and we are going to do all of this because we are governed by people who never quite understood that cutting government meant cutting government.

In honor of this fine proto-achievement, I propose the official congressional seal be changed to the silhouette of a man eating paste. We should easily be able to fund that important change by cutting "waste" in Congress itself, by which I mean all the damn members.