Oct 11, 2013 4 min read

When it comes to politics, I try to stay balanced.

I try to see the other side’s perspective, save the insults and acknowledge flaws in my own party and worldview.

Call me a bleeding-heart liberal if you want, but I think empathy and rationality go a long way toward solving problems.

But with time and this current fiasco, keeping calm is becoming increasingly difficult.

We are in the trenches of a 10-days-old government shutdown, and there’s a lot to be angry about.

Federal workers — about 800,000 of them — were told to stay home because their work is considered “non-essential,” for however long this shutdown lasts.

They won’t be paid unless the government decides they should be. National parks and monuments, NASA and the National Institute of Health have been shuttered. We are a few short weeks from reaching our debt limit, and, if that’s allowed to happen, it could be much more disastrous than the shutdown, with consequences on the global scale.

Worse, all of this shows that we, as citizens, are considered fodder by members of our own government.

Need this job to make rent? Have a vacation to a national park planned? Want our country to do good for its people, without daily strife and fighting?

Well, too bad for you. Someone in Washington has a point to make.

And let me be clear on something: This is not a bipartisan problem.

You cannot zoom out and say, “Well, this is a symptom of all of Washington being broken, Democrats and Republicans, alike.”

It’s not that Washington doesn’t have a bunch of problems — it does, and it is broken.

This overarching problem might be the fault of the two-party system altogether, which more and more Americans are beginning to realize is a horrible, divisive way to structure our government.

But in this case, with this shutdown, it’s not the two-party system that is keeping our government from working as it should.

It’s one party: Republicans.

More specifically, it’s one slice of Republicans: the tea party conservatives who have a lot of anger and a voracious, short-sighted vision in which they “take this country back” by running our current government into the ground. To these people, the shutdown is a good thing.

In fact, Michelle Bachmann, poster child of tea party conservatism, said as much: “The shutdown is exactly what we wanted … We got what we wanted.”

It’s a classic marketing and advertising trick. You create the problem, then you solve the problem.

They want us to believe that the government is broken and that only the tea party can fix it.

So they’re attempting to sabotage a piece of legislation — the Affordable Care Act — that will, ultimately, help people.

They can’t let the government — and especially not a big government administration like Obama’s — do something that ends up being looked at favorably in the annals of history (as most everyone thinks it will, once the initial kinks are ironed out and people start receiving benefits).

That would be like a diet pill company allowing a self-esteem movement to flourish.

And the media, in many cases, cover the shutdown as a failure on the part of both parties to come together on a budget.

That’s simply not true. The budget was not passed, because conservatives did not want to put through a budget to fund a law — The Affordable Care Act — that is already on the books and constitutionally upheld by the Supreme Court.

Heck, we still re-elected Obama when the Republicans ran on a platform of repealing Obamacare.

If American support for the ACA was so low, Obama wouldn’t be in office.

The ACA is happening, regardless of tea party tantrums.

And someday we’ll look back on this political sideshow and laugh and laugh (I hope).

Yet, the media has been hoodwinked into keeping a “balanced” perspective because, for years, conservatives have been hammering home the idea that the media has a liberal bias, and the media seems to think it should try to prove them wrong.

It takes an outsider newspaper — like “The Guardian” in the UK — to point out what’s really happening: “Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance,” they write.

They call out the fault-bearers by name.

So, please, let’s stop pretending this is anyone’s fault but the extremist faction of the Republican Party, who not only allowed the shutdown to happen, they actively encouraged it.

And let’s punish them by pushing them out of office as soon as possible.