Republicans have a little history of magnifying their minor personal slights in an unseemly contrast to the real effects on regular people from government shutdowns. In 1995, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich earned himself an infamous Daily News cover as an oversized bottle-wielding infant after he told a reporter he’d shut down the government because President Bill Clinton made him sit at the back of Air Force One.

When you contrast these temper tantrums with the real problems of the world, it makes these erstwhile leaders seem petty and out of touch with reality. The Centers for Disease Control, where two thirds of the staff have been furloughed, announced yesterday they have “ceased monitoring flu outbreaks and unfamiliar strains of it since the government shutdown.” Last week, the CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden told CBS News, “I usually don’t lose sleep despite the threats that we face, but I am losing sleep [over the shutdown] because we don’t know if we’ll be able to find and stop things that might kill people.” ] Over at the NIH Clinical Center, an estimated 200 patients will be turned away by the each week of the shutdown, including about 30 children, many of them with cancer. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told the Associated Press, “This is the place where people have wanted to come when all else has failed. It’s heartbreaking.”