Success Is a Major Failure

Congressional leaders dumped a garbage “continuing resolution” on the House, a spending bill (to just keep government funded for a few months) that somehow, despite having a simple purpose, ran to 1,547 pages. I mean, whoops, how’d all that extra stuff get in there, right? The bill unnecessarily bundled a bunch of unrelated things into a package, so that elected officials from hurricane-damaged areas would be forced to vote for a bunch of other pork, ideological warfare, and open corruption to get their disaster relief. To their credit and at long last, many House Republicans announced that they would vote against the thing. Growing the tiniest little embryonic spines, conservative politicians refused to support a series of dysfunctional maneuvers and dirty tricks. So here’s how Politico reports that choice:

So conservatives held the line and won a small victory that takes baby steps toward a bunch of quite reasonable goals for institutional health, like single-subject bills, and now negotiations are underway to try to get to a simpler continuing resolution, which is remarkably good news for once. They won — they stood firm for something worthwhile, and successfully made their point. This is a nightmare, and it means they’re descending into a grueling climate of devastating failure.

1. Bob won the wrestling match;

2. This is a sign of defeat for Bob, who is ruined.

We’re going to see variations on this maneuver over and over and over again. They won, which is a major defeat. See also last year’s bill to “solve” the illegal immigration problem by guaranteeing a couple million illegal entries a year. Republicans refused to pass it, which means — not in real life, but in the idiotic rhetorical space — that Republicans refused to address the problem. Huge failure! Why did Trump do this to them?

Every headline is going to be upside down. All horrible defeats that drive Republicans downward into chaos and ruin are going to be modest Republican successes. Remember this, and use your decoder ring when daring to approach so-called “news.”

In other news, I said this morning on I-still-call-it-Twitter that somebody needed a swift kick in the ass as a wake-up call, and they suspended my account. Because I was calling for violence, apparently with direct incitement to have some actual person literally be struck from behind. My appeal referenced the existence of figurative speech, but they didn’t fall for that one, knowing that in my sick heart I actually want literal feet to slam into literal gluteus maximi. So I plan to be irritated by life until bedtime, or at least until after dinner. It’s really kicking my ass, by which I mean that I’ve been murdered.

More soon.