Maddow Blog says it so much better than I

Ok so I'm tooling around the vastness of the cyber-world, reading bits and pieces from the right, left, center and a few, well, all I can say are not from this planet (they can't be or at least they are not members of humanity).  It's the totally clueless I want to focus on here, those that don't understand that the government debacle we are currently witnessing was intelligently designed with one goal in mind, and the "needs" of the people, is not it.

• This is not just about Obamacare anymore. ~ Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y. 

Oh, please do enlighten us as to why you have "slimmed down" the government?

• We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is. ~ Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind

You don't know what that "even" is??  WTF!  Might want to look into how your party is attempting to dismantle the government.

Scratch that,,,

Damn, I was off to a good start, when I ran across this gem of insight, How Congress reached this point from Steve Benen of "The Maddow Blog;"  he say it so much better than I possibly could:

This is critically important to understanding what's happening on Capitol Hill right now. If the House and Senate had gone to a conference committee back in the spring to work out their budget differences, Republicans would have been expected to compromise to reach a broader agreement -- but Republicans don't want to compromise.

So they decided to abandon the budget process they themselves had asked for so they could do precisely what they're doing now -- use extortion instead of compromise to try to get what they want.

The government may shut down in 15 hours, but it's not an accident. Indeed, it could have been easily avoided if Congress had just done what Congresses are supposed to do when the House and Senate disagree on the budget. But Republicans insisted on this confrontation, hoping that if they just threatened enough harm, maybe Democrats would put aside the election results and meet some or all of the GOP's demands. 

As Benen points out, this started back in May (I actually believe it started long before that, 40 years ago with Nixon's Southern Strategy among others, but that may be another post) the debacle didn't just appear over night.  By all appearances it's not going to end any time soon, referring to what Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) offered Democrats.  

Collins, along with GOP Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), worked with Democrats to draw up a 23-page draft that would have ended the shutdown and funded federal agencies for six months at current spending levels. It would have left intact the sequestration cuts scheduled to hit Jan. 15 but would have given agency officials flexibility to decide where the reductions should occur.

In addition, the proposal would raise the debt limit through Jan. 31, setting up a path for the two sides to have broad budget talks to try to tackle the issues of taxes and entitlement reform.

In exchange, Republicans sought tweaks to Obama’s Affordable Care Act, including a two-year delay of a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices that is unpopular in both parties.

Ignoring for the moment that it was a one-sided deal, there is another problem (child), even if Senate Democrats took Collins’ deal, it wouldn’t have made a difference since House Republicans said they’d refuse to even bring the bill to the floor. And why’s that? Because House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is thinking ahead.

The leaders, however, began the meeting trying to prepare their troops for the likelihood that they would have to adopt a deal cut in the Senate. Both leaders explained that the White House is no longer willing to negotiate with the House, that McConnell and Reid were talking, and that a bipartisan agreement is likely to emerge that will need the House’s approval.

But instead of absorbing this painful reality, some rank-and-file Republicans grew visibly excited about the prospect of opposing such a deal, said one person in the room. This defiance was fed by Ryan, who stood up and railed against the Collins proposal, saying the House could not accept either a debt-limit bill or a government-funding measure that would delay the next fight until the new year.

According to two Republicans familiar with the exchange, Ryan argued that the House would need those deadlines as “leverage” for delaying the health-care law’s individual mandate and adding a “conscience clause” — allowing employers and insurers to opt out of birth-control coverage if they find it objectionable on moral or religious grounds — and mentioned tax and entitlement goals Ryan had focused on in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

So let me get this straight.  Paul Ryan, the man who believes rape is a form of conception, is pre-planning another crises at which point he’ll demand restrictions on access to contraception?  Wake up people!!  This is what happens when religious dogma becomes a political ideology:

The willingness of Republicans to take the debt ceiling and the federal budget hostage in order to try to extract concessions from Democrats is probably the most lasting gift that the Tea Party has granted the country. More reasonable Republican politicians fear being primaried by Tea Party candidates. A handful of wide-eyed fanatics in Congress have hijacked the party. The Tea Party base and the hard right politicians driving this entire thing seem oblivious to the consequences. It’s no wonder, since so many of them—particularly those in leadership—are fundamentalist Christians whose religions have distorted their worldview until they cannot actually see what they’re doing and what kind of damage it would cause.

[,,,]
Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic stability if the go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded.

IMHO what people are failing to see is the underlying mechanism that is driving the Reich - control; and control is the mainstay of Dominionism.  Hence the deep seated need and repeated efforts to control women (the consciousness clause and numerous attempts to ban abortion).  Chris Hedges sums it up quite well:

The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent,,,

Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology,,,

Think about it people, this debacle has nothing to do with money.  In the minds of the Reich, it never was about money.  It is about "a world dominated by Christianity. Not just under the control of Christianity but completely and utterly dominated by it. According to Dominionists, every aspect of our lives is subject to the strictures of the Bible. Our personal lives and social lives must be lived in accordance with the word of God. Economics, politics, science, the arts and the law are all to be placed under the auspices of Christianity."

All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness ~ Chris Hedges