The criminal is eventually captured, but he blames the dead hostage on the police: "You didn't meet my demands. I had no choice but to kill a hostage." he says with a shrug.
That's essentially the scenario that is playing out right now in Washington. The Republicans have decided that they're so serious about their goal of repealing so-called "Obamacare" that they are willing to shut down the government if the president does not kowtow to their demand to defund health care reform.
So whose fault would it be if the government is eventually shut down due to such intransigence? Why, President Obama, of course!
"Well, the one who's threatening to shut down the government is the president and his Democratic allies. What they're basically saying is, unless the budget funds Obamacare, they won't support it. They're basically saying that, unless we fund Obamacare, they are willing to shut down the government.... [I]t's their insistence on continuing to pour money into this broken and failed experiment that is threatening a government shutdown, not us."
So said Marco Rubio recently during an interview with Sean Hannity.
Setting aside hostage-taking politics for a moment, there has been, for what seems like quite a while now, an 'Opposite Day' strategy among some Republicans to blatantly deny reality. They want to shut down the government over "Obamacare", but such a shut down would be Obama's fault. Waterboarding is OK, because it's not really torture, but "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques". Osama was caught on Obama's watch, which means that Dubya should be given credit.
It's like some members of the Republican party collectively suffer from cognitive distortion, defined by Wikipedia as "gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs". It's Republicans' world; we just live in it.
The $64,000 question is this: how long will the American people put up with being taken hostage by an increasingly radicalized Republican party?
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