The Ghost of ACA Sabotage Plots Past*

Since the latest battle in the Republican Party's 15 year long campaign to gut the ACA will reach its catastrophic conclusion in just a few days...and since we may well be going from one government shutdown to the next over that issue... and since a leitmotif of this little blog of mine has been the absolutely lethal effect which the Both Sides Do It lie has had on our media and our politics... in the spirit of the season, let's tie that all together in a big, Christmas bow and take a No Fair Remembering Stuff (™) journey back to the Before Time about which most dare not speak.

The date: September 25, 2013.  

The location: The United States Senate.

The issue: Passing the damn budget.

Tea Party crank, first-term Texas senator and possible Zodiac-killer, Ted Cruz, decided that heaving a boulder onto the budget-approval tracks by staging a filibuster to kill the Affordable Care Act by stopping the vote to pass the budget would conjure him some political capital.  So he began running his mouth on September 25th and didn't stop until the next day.  His all-night stunt included him quoting the Founding Fathers and the Bible and reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”  

There are videos of this on YouTube which I will spare you because I'm a nice guy.

Cruz's irritating stunt didn't delay the Senate vote on the ACA.  It didn't change any votes in the Senate, but it did manage to piss off a number of Senate Republicans.  However it also inspired Republican Tea Party lunatics in the House to just up and shut the whole government down to try to kill the Affordable Care Act.  

The Republican House kept the government shut down for 16 long days and then gave up.  

In the end the shutdown accomplished nothing but the temporary furlough of 800,000 federal workers, punching the economy in the gut and infuriating the general public.  This doomed idiocy was led by Heritage Action and the Fake Tea Party.  Republicans lost, Democrats won, and the government reopened with an agreement to vote on a clean funding bill that didn't screw with the ACA, on October 25 

Here is a portion of a speech that then-president Barack Obama gave during the shutdown, included here because it'll come up later.

Given all of this high drama, it should come as no surprise that on Sunday, October 20, 2013, the Sunday Shows were full of Gummint Shutdown Talk.  And, since I have extensive Sunday Morning Comin' Down archives --

-- I rooted around in there for a bit and my oh my, is this all going to sound familiar.  

This is me, from The Before Time of 2013.

This week, another drunk dial from the Valley of the Dead as the Both Sides Caucus fired up their fighters and screamed into the sky to strafe any attempt at truth and reconciliation to bits.

First, on "This Week...with The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea" we begin with a panel of delusional teabaggers perfectly ordinary, indignant white Americans who express their love for Murrica and their completely rational concerns about how the Kenyan Usurper has personally stomped everything they ever loved to death by dutifully regurgitating every brain-dead, wingnut bumper-sticker you have ever heard of.

What was missing?

How about...an identical panel of non-crazy Liberals?

Anywhere?

Ever?

Patiently and lovingly deconstructing paranoid Conservative piffle?

For the one millionth time?

That you will never see on network teevee.

Instead, we pivot straight to Matthew Dowd (paid Conservative Shill who still has a job in front of a teevee camera for reasons that continue to defy understanding) and Adam Kinzinger (R, IL Whitelandia) tag-teaming the Kenyan Usurper for committing the single most horrific transgression against the serenity of the life forms who exist floating from party to party within the Washington D.C. terrarium: actually naming and blaming the people who were actually to blame for the most recent Republican clusterfuck:

DOWD I think that Martha, part of the real problem in this is until this part changes I think that we're going to be in this situation. We need to redefine winning differently. We define winning today as us versus them.

I'm going to score points and if I don't score points I'm going to decide who the winner and the loser is. We define everything as a battle, everything as a civil war. The president, I think, has tried to balance this tension, but I think he constantly falls into; I think he would like to bring the country together and be accommodating and do all that. He ran on that just like Bush ran on that.

The end result of Bush's didn't turn out well. The end results of President Obama's didn't turn out well. But I think President Obama lapses back into this sort of dualistic thing that, OK I wasn't able to do it, I'm going to point fingers and I'm going to, and you watched his speech last week. And his speech last week was a perfect microcosm--

Martha Raddatz, (warming the seat for The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea): Let's change the tone, but maybe not. 

DOWD: Let's change the tone but they're at fault. Whenever you say they're at fault, you can't--

To her credit, Representative Donna Edwards, (D, MD) actually attempted to haul this umpteenth iteration of the same, sick, tired, trifling, poisonous, premeditated, highly profitable and genuinely evil Both Sider bullshit to the ground:

EDWARDS: Well Matt come on it is really important here. We don't want to do a rewrite of this. And in order not to do a rewrite, you actually have to understand who was, who was at fault. And there was real fault here. We had a majority of Republicans--

And for her trouble, she was promptly and frantically side-tackled (in a brutal, face-mask-grabbing, fact-snapping move called "Blitzering" in the lingua franca of Bullshit Mountain) by Ms. Raddatz:

RADDATZ: But that again is--

EDWARDS: And Democrats who wanted to keep the government opened.

RADDATZ: Peter let me switch a little bit here. I want you all to talk about Obamacare...

Translation: Please stop pointing out that more than half the guests on this show are paranoids, nihilists, rubes and liars!

Meanwhile, over at "Meet the Press" we find exactly the same song being sung in a different key.

First, to establish that one is not flat-out insane, one must make a token gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the Tea Party (for which you expressed such fondness back in 2010) might actually be a little tetched:

DAVID BROOKS:  I think the Republicans may decide to tire of doing face plants. And so I think the moderate Republicans, such as they exist, may have had a little manhood injection, willing to stand up to the Tea Party and actually be a much more bipartisan, or at least a more moderate, party, a more realistic party...

DAVID BROOKS: ...The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side. 

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

driftglass aside/

Golly, I wonder whatever happened to those institutions and think tanks and passion and money?

Oh yeah!  I remember!   

In order to win elections, you handed all of that over to these people  

 

when you made Rush Limbaugh your "Majority Maker" 20 years ago.

/ end driftglass aside

Then, once they were done with all the icky work of grudgingly granting that Liberals have been right all along (without, of course, actually acknowledging the existence of Liberals or their rightness) 'bout a mile outta Both Sider Town...

...Andrea Mitchell says, "Pig Pen, this here's Rubber Duck...

...And I'm about to put the hammer down."

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Both sides are going to have to give.

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy

Rockin' through the night.

Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy,

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. The question [President Barack Obama had] never answered in all these years is, "How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?"

Come on and join our convoy

Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.

DAVID GREGORY [rough translation]:  Fuck yeah!

We gonna roll this truckin' convoy

'Cross the U-S-A.

DAVID BROOKS:   He's got 40 House Republicans who are never going to be with him. How does he siphon them off and get the other Republicans on his side to get a majority coalition? You have to anger the left a little to build that bipartisan coalition. He's never figured out a way to do that.

Convoy!

E. J. Dionne was on-hand to provide some tired, token push-back -- 

--compared to the Democrats, oddly particularly in Tea Party. The president, a lot of times, though, when people say the president should lead, what they want him to do is adopt Republican positions and then push for those. That's not leadership, that's capitulation. I think we should stop talking about a grand bargain and try to have normal government in the next two months. Let's just get rid of some of this sequester, which is hurting the economy, and which a lot of Republicans don't like.

-- to which absolutely no one paid any heed.  Of course, if E.J. Dionne did want anyone to pay any attention to what he was saying, all he really needed to do was turn on Mr. Brooks fast-fast-fast, put a finger right in his face and precede his remarks with "Look fucko..."  But then he would be faced with the unhappy task of explaining to his wife and all the little Dionnes why daddy didn't have no job no more, so don't waste to much time waiting at that bus stop...

End of 2013 Sunday Show tour.  Before exiting the vehicle, please check around your seat for any personal effects (or affects, hahaha) you may have dropped during the journey.

And looking back at that 2013 shitshow, the thing is, Republicans were entirely to blame. 100%.  There was no dispute about that.  What these two men were bitching about was that Obama had violated the legacy media's Both Sides Do It commandment by saying what everyone knew out loud.  That Republicans were at fault.  Period.  

And remember, this was a year and a half after respected political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their now-famous article in the Washington Post, "Let's just say it: The Republican Party is the problem".  And the two diametrically opposed reactions to the article tell the story of just how corrupt the legacy media had become.  Because while it got both Mann and Ornstein blackballed from the Sunday Shows, it also quickly became the most widely read, shared and forwarded opinion piece they had ever written, even briefly crashing the Post's comment section servers.

Also, remember that the Mann and Ornstein column came a full decade after the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, which gave us the capacity to say -- in print and in public -- all the stuff we'd been saying among ourselves for decades, but the legacy media wouldn't touch with a barge pole.  Especially our assault on the Both Sides Do It Lie.

But in October of 2013 that patently ridiculous lie was still being staunchly defended across the board by America's media elite on the Sunday Shows.

And in December of 2025 it still is.

*Note:  We mentioned this incident briefly on our December 23rd episode of The Professional Left Podcast.  However, we got the timeline backwards: Cruz's filibuster preceded the shutdown, it didn't follow it.  Management regrets the error and, rest assured, although our entire research staff and all of our archivists have all fled into the hills in shame, those responsible will be hunted down and brutally reprimanded.  

Burn The Lifeboats