The GOP has passed bills to fund veterans services, the NIH, the parks and WIC and many other things. The president orders Harry Reid to keep up the blockade. It isn’t the GOP who lacks an endgame, it is the president. Perhaps he actually believes the really dumb analysis that the shutdown is diverting attention from the utter collapse of the Obamacare exchanges and the sticker shock rolling out across the land as people get their premium hikes, all courtesy of President Obama and Obamacare. Every health insurance bill should have a small addition at the bottom of it “Brought o you by President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi,” because like Captain Picard they really did “make it so.”

So with anger growing at the casualty and wholly unnecessary cruelty of the government towards the people who fund it, the people inside the Manhattan-Beltway media elite bubble tell each other the GOP is getting killed. Hmmm. I don’t think so. I think the utter inanity of the Big Three are combining into a politically lethal display of contempt for voters, the sort of contempt that drives enormous turnout and activism, and which won’t even blink if Jack Lew climbs on top of the Lincoln Memorial and screams “default is coming, default is coming” as the non-furloughed combined bands of the Armed Services strike up doom music beneath him.