Day four of the government shutdown, and the Tea Partiers can barely conceal their pleasure--or their hypocrisy.  Fox News has called it the government "slimdown" and prominent graphics read "The Obama Shutdown."  They repeat endlessly that no one is being seriously hurt--until they seized upon the closure of the World War II Memorial for a shameless appeal to "patriotism" as their signature cause.  Texas Rep. Neugebauer, flag pin in his lapel, large plastic flag protruding from his pocket, berated a young park ranger for not letting people in, telling her that she should be ashamed of herself.  She took his hypocritical abuse graciously, but once, smugly proud of himself, he turned around to leave, he was confronted by a more aggressive furloughed employee who didn't treat him with the respect Rep. Neubegauer expected.  (Does the Texas Congressional delegation have more assholes than is statistically probable?)

And speaking of respect, Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman announced that the Tea Partiers would not be disrespected.  They would hold out till they got what they wanted, though he didn't know what that was.

With its six Republicans in Congress, Kansas isn't spared the inanity.  Rep. Tim Huelskamp, trying to assure us that a shutdown wasn't a bad thing, said he didn't know anyone who was affected by the stalemate.  Given the bubble in which he lives, I'm not surprised that he doesn't know any of the nearly nine million women and children threatened with losing their WIC benefits--or the Head Start children who will lose their place.  But even he must know some of the 800,000 government employees who are on furlough from "non-essential" services like the CDC and FDA.

My tongue has several bite marks from not responding to the anodyne comment by a friend that she agreed with an editorial recommending compromise.  What does that even mean?  The 80 or so Republicans who are blocking the budget aren't going to consider compromise as they've made clear innumerable times on many battles.  The ACA was passed four years ago, and the final law was the result of many, many compromises on the President's side, far too many for those of us who favor a single-payer system.  And for the last four years, the hard-core conservatives have done nothing but hold their breaths until they get their way.  The act is in force, and it isn't going to be defunded.

My hope is that the Republicans are right about one thing: once an "entitlement" is in place, it's not going to be taken away.  The European, single-payer health care systems didn't spring full-blown into existence; they most often grew incrementally.  Parts of the ACA have been in effect for some time; the exchanges, despite the resistance in many states, went into effect at the beginning of this month.  The bureaucracy is in place.  And, no matter how much Republicans want to wish the law away, it's not going anywhere.

I read another hopeful editorial.  The author argued that the districts that have been gerrymandered to create safe, white, conservative districts encourage the representatives to take ever more extreme positions, farther and farther from mainstream America.  Eventually, he believes, these representatives, safe in their own districts, will become isolated from the rest of the voters, leading to the self-induced extinction of the wing nut faction of the Republican party.