A Terrible, Tragic Game
By CHARLES M. BLOW, NYT
Speaker John Boehner barked Friday about the government shutdown: “This isn’t some damn game.”
The House leader was responding to an anonymous “senior administration official” who was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, saying: “We are winning. ... It doesn’t really matter to us’ how long the shutdown lasts ‘because what matters is the end result.’ ”
(The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, distanced the administration from the boastful nature of that quote, referring to the president and a budget bill known as a continuing resolution in a tweet: “This is absurd. POTUS wants the shutdown to end NOW. Speaker can do that NOW by putting a clean C.R. to a vote. #JustVote”)
That said, the speaker is wrong once again. This unfortunately is a game. It’s a game that he allowed himself to be pushed into playing and one he can find no easy way out of. It’s a game in which he thought the president would blink. But President Obama is staring straight ahead, wide-eyed like a long-haul trucker at 3 in the morning. This is a game in which the speaker cared more about keeping his job than about keeping the American government running, the people who work for it and those who depend on it.
(More here.)
Speaker John Boehner barked Friday about the government shutdown: “This isn’t some damn game.”
The House leader was responding to an anonymous “senior administration official” who was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, saying: “We are winning. ... It doesn’t really matter to us’ how long the shutdown lasts ‘because what matters is the end result.’ ”
(The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, distanced the administration from the boastful nature of that quote, referring to the president and a budget bill known as a continuing resolution in a tweet: “This is absurd. POTUS wants the shutdown to end NOW. Speaker can do that NOW by putting a clean C.R. to a vote. #JustVote”)
That said, the speaker is wrong once again. This unfortunately is a game. It’s a game that he allowed himself to be pushed into playing and one he can find no easy way out of. It’s a game in which he thought the president would blink. But President Obama is staring straight ahead, wide-eyed like a long-haul trucker at 3 in the morning. This is a game in which the speaker cared more about keeping his job than about keeping the American government running, the people who work for it and those who depend on it.
(More here.)
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