Charge of the Light Brigade.
Metaphors to the left of me. Metaphors to the right of me. It’s a double flanking maneuver!
Kimberley Strassel compared the Republican effort to win a few concessions of ObamaCare and federal spending by daring the president to allow the country to hit the debt ceiling to the charge of the Light Brigade, commemorated by Tennyson’s famous poem:
On an October morning in the Crimea, 1854, British Lord Cardigan led his 600-strong cavalry force into a frontal assault of a fully dug-in and alerted Russian artillery battery. The charge was courageous. And it was suicidal.
The Light Brigade was ripped apart in the Valley of Death. Commenting on the bravery and utter futility of the attack, French Marshal Pierre Bosquet declared: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie.” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war. It is folly.”)
This she says is what happened to the Republicans.
On a far, far lower journalistic level than Strassel, we have Las Vegas newspaper scribbler Steve Sebelius comparing Rep. Mark Amodei’s principled vote against the budget and debt ceiling deal (which is how Obama and Harry Reid voted in 2006, by the way) to a Japanese solider on some distant atoll still fighting World War II:
“My conscience is clear with respect to an all-out effort in a four-against-one fight,” Amodei said. “I now know how those folks at the Alamo felt.”
But Amodei wasn’t defending American soil against hostile invaders — he was intentionally grinding his own government to a halt in an already-lost cause. A better example would be a Japanese soldier on a deserted Pacific island, fighting anyone who comes ashore, pathetically unaware that the war ended long, long ago.
No, Republicans mistakenly thought they were dealing with rationale people who would compromise before hitting the full faith and credit wall that every side said would be apocalyptic in scale and end in financial ruin and deprivation. That is actually what they were willing to do. They sat on the ammo dump and dared the GOP to shoot.
Harry and Barry were in it to win, even if it was a pyrrhic victory.
Perhaps, California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock said it most succinctly:
Given the ruthless and vindictive way the shutdown has been handled, I now believe that this president would willfully act to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, unless the Congress acquiesces to all of his demands, at least as long as he sees political advantage in doing so.
Bring on the Hidden Imam to hasten victory. Look it up.
4TH ST8 