Playing the Pickett's Charge card
by digby
York also says the GOP should declare victory with the Ryan budget levels and go home. (And a sweet victory it is ...)
In any case, we are now fully into freakshow mode with a full fledged hissy fit in the making about Democrats hating the troops or some such nonsense:
"The Obama administration has decided they want to make the government shutdown as painful as possible, even taking the unnecessary step of keeping the Greatest Generation away from a monument built in their honor," Priebus said. "That's not right, and it's not fair."
Veterans from Missouri, Illinois and Michigan entered the closed memorial on Wednesday, Day 2 of the government shutdown. National Park Service spokeswoman Carol Johnson told ABC News that the Honor Flights are being granted access to the memorial "to conduct First Amendment activities."
"These soldiers gave everything in fighting for our freedom and the thought that they would not be allowed into their memorial because of the partisan divide in Washington is beyond the pale," said Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who visited with the Illinois veterans at the memorial.
Hopefully, we will not see this morph into General Betrayus levels of hyperbole with Democrats scurrying in all direction over nothing. I doubt it will --- this is just too pathetic. But you can never go wrong underestimating the Democrats' willingness to prostrate themselves before the Republicans the minute "the troops" are mentioned. (Which has put us into a deeply unfair bind, as Dday writes today in Salon.)
Regardless of all that, it would appear that we have gone beyond the obsession with shutting down Obamacare, which I heard someone describe as the Republicans' desire to have one last "Pickett's charge" before the law went into effect. And that is pretty stunning, if true:
Pickett's Charge was an infantry assault ordered by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee against Maj. Gen. George G. Meade's Union positions on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Its futility was predicted by the charge's commander, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, and it was arguably an avoidable mistake from which the Southern war effort never fully recovered psychologically. The farthest point reached by the attack has been referred to as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
You'd think the neo-confederates, if anyone, would be aware of this. But they've probably been brainwashed into thinking the Union stole their rightful victory by conning the troops into giving up or something --- right along with every other lie they've been taught in right wing bizarroworld.
*York article in the Washington Examiner here.
