And also a dupe, but a dupe that we should be reminded of.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=127487

Ooops. Lack of tag cohesion. My fault.

'Democracy has been suspended, Mr. Chairman.'

Thank you, Matt Stone.

"Both sides do it" is the refuge of those who grudgingly admit that the one they agree with has done something wrong.

Just because countless people have committed murder doesn't give one a free pass. Doing the wrong thing isn't something where you get a turn to make things "even" or whatever.

It's also an annoying phenomenon I'm seeing more and more these days. Someone who has done something obviously immoral will get up and say "I've done nothing illegal." While that may be true in court, it doesn't mean that the law isn't broken or allows one to do something one shouldn't, like multi-billion dollar corporations evading taxes. In this case, the rules allowed someone to make it impossible for a clean bill to come to the house floor, guaranteeing a shutdown, and that's what was done, subverting even the meager representative democracy we could claim to have.

The Republicans have shut the government down completely three times since the Clinton Administration. The Democrats have shut the government down zero times since the Clinton Administration.

Not that I feel a need to defend parties on a partisan level across historically shifting party currents, that would be silly, but in recent memory, one side clearly enjoys the process far more than the other.