The Crying Game

The blogs on the right are pretty depressed after last night's humiliating defeat, and deservedly so:  America now knows that the Tea Party is basically only capable of ineffectual tantrums that do nothing to achieve their stated goals and instead only harm voters in both parties.  Republicans won precisely nothing, other than a lesson to be learned about how irrelevant they really are right now.

Some are learning this.  Jonah Goldberg has thrown in the towel over at NRO:

The core promise of Ted Cruz and Mike Lee wasn’t “We’re going to fill the leadership vacuum in a branch of Congress we weren’t elected to!” Nor was it, “We will educate the public on how bad Obamacare is!” Their core promise was that they were going to defund Obamacare (without needing Democratic votes!) and that their legislative brinksmanship was worth the risks because after October 1, there was no chance of getting rid of it. I bring this up not to relitigate the fight, but to be simply honest about where I am coming from.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line notes that while Goldberg wants to move on (and I think the concept of Goldberg being honest about anything is nearly hysterical, personally) the question of the shutdown will loom large in 2014 and especially 2016:

But in 2015, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination will begin in earnest. Most, if not all, of the candidates will have taken a position on the CR/shutdown. Some who were front-and-center in this controversy will probably be candidates.

At that point, the question of who was right and who was wrong about the shutdown will not be academic. If, for example, the shutdown turns out to have been a win in the fight against Obamacare, big government, and/or Democrats, this outcome will weigh heavily in favor of Ted Cruz’s candidacy (if it materializes). And vice versa. 

Until then, it would be nice to move. But with a high-stakes debate looming over who was right and who was wrong, there’s probably no way it will be deferred.

On the other hand, there's a lot of outright rage at the losers right now to go around, as Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom states:

I won’t live as a subject. So if I’m forced to, I plan to make some of those who forced us into accepting such a fate my own personal prison bitches.

Bryan Preston at Pajamas Media blames the squishy RINOs who sold out Ted Cruz:

In the Republicans’ case, the divisions within their ranks didn’t help. “Wacko bird” didn’t help. Peter King spending more time assaulting Republicans than Democrats didn’t help. It also didn’t help to rant “you support Obamacare!” if you didn’t happen to agree with the strategy to stop Obamacare. A divided force will just about always lose to a unified force. The Republicans failed to divide the Democrats, while they went into the fight divided themselves.

And William "Col. Mustard" Jacobson at Legal Insurrection?  Well, he's still Col. Mustard.

At least some Republicans are on record as being willing to do just about anything to stop Obamacare although not as much as Obama and Democrats were willing to do to save it. If there were hostage-takers and suicide bombers, they weren’t Ted Cruz and Mike Lee or the conservatives in the House.

The awesome whirlwind of blame will continue for a while, but it's important to remember that Democrats still have a lot of work to do, and December 15th most likely means we're going to go through all of this again soon.   Whether or not Dems will go to the polls and start tossing out Republicans remains to be seen.