US Government Shutdown: A “Comic Opera”?

By John Reimann

Well, it seems they dodged a bullet. Or did they? Was there ever a realistic chance of the bullet striking home? We’re talking about the threat of a government shut down, and now Obama and the Republicans are talking their way into a deal it seems.

The partial shut down (83% of government functions continued, according to the Wall St. Journal) was bad enough. The Wall St. Journal’s chief of their Washington bureau wrote about it: “Let’s face it: A superpower that isn’t sure it can fund its government or pay its bills, overseen by a president who recently found that members of Congress from both parties were unwilling to follow his lead on military action in Syria, isn’t in a great position to work its will abroad.” He writes about “the broader doubts about American credibility and reliability now being sown, regardless of the outcome of the current comic opera. If the president and Congress can’t agree on a plan to keep open the Washington Monument, how can foreign powers assume the U.S. government can unite behind efforts to do much harder tasks abroad?”

read more:government shutdown – tragic comedy?