The ones who aren’t irate are terrified. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, is a clubhouse sort of guy, but he’s trying desperately to get renominated without a right-wing primary opponent. So far, Cornyn has signed onto the letter promising to go along with the government shutdown threat, taken his name off the letter and then burrowed into the ground, where he will emerge in September, unless he sees his shadow.

And imagine being Mitch McConnell, the senator previously known as “powerful minority leader.” McConnell already has a Tea Party opponent back in Kentucky, and he’s had to grovel to Rand Paul for support. (“Particularly important and means a great deal.”) His campaign manager is the junior senator’s nephew. Both Paul and Cruz spend their careers violating the old party dictum about never speaking ill of a Republican. Asked about speculation that Gov. Rick Perry might run again for president, Paul grinned and said there were three good reasons Perry could succeed: "You know, Texas is a big, successful state. He’s a long-term governor. I can’t remember the third one, but, uh.”

Cruz told Glenn Beck that Republicans who didn’t like his idea were “scared.” He called the House’s votes to defund or dismember Obamacare “empty,” thus casting aspersion on the lower chamber’s entire reason for existence.

The fight between the Shutdown Trio and their colleagues is not about the Affordable Care Act, which virtually every Republican in Congress loathes and gives speeches about constantly, even when the topic under consideration is supposed to be oil drilling or the next secretary of labor.

The fight is over whether the fortunes of the party would be improved if people connected it to the sudden closing of the national parks and the local passport office. “We’ve been down that road,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss on MSNBC. “We shut down the government ...and we got our butts kicked over shutting down the government.” Chambliss is 69 and about to retire. Nobody is ever going to invite him to give the keynote address at the Iowa Republican Party summer picnic.

“The sort of cocktail chatter wisdom that ‘Oh, the shutdown was a disaster for Republicans’ is not borne out by the data,” Cruz said. The Democrats are sort of horrified and sort of enthralled by the whole drama.

“Give a call to Newt Gingrich. He’ll return your phone calls. Ask him how it worked,” suggested Majority Leader Harry Reid. Gingrich, who led the House during the last government shutdown in 1995, was busy touring the Peoria Zoo, where he admired a parrot.