Idiocy

Please try to explain this one: after closing down the government and furloughing 800,000 "non-essential" workers (now down to around 500,000 because Chuck Hagel redefined "essential" for the Defense Department), the House Republicans voted to pay those furloughed workers for the time they are not working.

Huh?

If government is bloated and overfunded, why in the hell would they want to pay people for work they haven't done?  Yes, it makes perfect sense to give the "essential" workers, slogging on without paychecks during the shutdown, back pay when the idiotic "crisis" is over — but why do they want to pay, say, the labor statistics people who were unable to produce a report for September, or the food inspectors who aren't finding the bacterial infections that might be in our lettuce?  Isn't that kind of like — umm — welfare?

Okay, it looks like a debt default will be pushed back by six weeks — but goddamn it, they're still idiots.

. . . . .

(By the way, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and even the Koch brothers are feeling the red-hot poker of Tea Party craziness sliding up their asses.  They really should have known better,  along with scores of other pro-business lobbyists, but they put anti-regulatory enthusiasm above common sense.  Too bad, assholes.  You were idiots too.)