It’s like when you have kids and it’s during summer vacation, right? You come home from a day of work, tired, hungry, digging deep so that you can greet your kids, cook dinner, help with homework, clean up after everyone and, maybe, maybe, you can get a few moments of peace before you go to sleep. You walk in to controlled chaos, take in the situation, greet your kids and take general note of the state of your home. You notice a lamp is broken. You put down your bag, hang your keys on the peg, you take off your coat, you ask, “So, what happened to the lamp?”
One of your off-spring starts telling the story of the day when another jumps in and says something else and the third one starts singing a little ditty. You say, “Well, that sounds like quite the day! What a beautiful song! But, what happened to the lamp?” And the whole thing starts all over . . . finally, as you are moving around the kitchen, pulling out dinner ingredients, warming up pans and cajoling the kids to start setting the table and getting ready for dinner, you ask, “So, it looks like one of you broke the lamp?” To which your children start talking over one another to describe the events that led up to the lamp being broken.
Cooking and nodding and not particularly following any one child’s story in particular, you note that the lamp is still broken and that someone did it. If you have kids who act like these Republicans are currently acting, they will begin yelling, one over the other, each telling something similar, but different, from their siblings. One then pipes up that the final arbiter needs to be your neighbor, who has also been out at work all day, and the other two kids chime in and agree to this. You try to explain that the neighbor does not have any standing in this discussion as that is, while clever, not related to the topic of this discussion. Finally, dinner is made, the table is fairly well set, and you are sitting down and you say, simply, “The lamp is broken. This is why we can’t have nice things.”
This is how I see the proceedings yesterday and today. It was the best allegory I could come up with as I’m still trying to follow the tortured and illogical arguments presented by the Republicans. They know they have done and are doing wrong, but they can’t see their way out of this mess without losing face. And, rather than swallowing their egos, admit they are wrong and help save our Republic, they would rather destroy our country, our Constitution, our lamp, if you will, to save their egos. This is simply wrong.