The editorial continues by explaining that the government shutdown was caused by the Republicans' failed effort to derail President Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA), which is itself hardly a radical law. But it is a law that ensures health insurance to 40 million people who had none, and it does it through private markets. And then the Post really nails the Republicans, pointing to their failure to block the ACA's passage, their failure to get it declared unconstitutional, and their failure to stop it before it began when they failed to stop President Obama's (easy) re-election. And then it gets even worse for the Republicans, as the Post reminds them that they still haven't made good on their promise to come up with their own plan to replace the ACA.

Next come a list of Republican failures on process and on policy, from the FBI having to close cases to 800,000 workers being furloughed to the pettiness of the fake optics that would have been depriving the health insurance subsidy from their own underpaid aides. And there is a warning about the potential economic havoc should the Republican brinksmanship lead to a government inability to pay its bills. That potential next concocted Republican crisis is now just weeks away.

In summation, the Post summarizes its astoundingly accurate take on the current crisis, by not playing the game of false equivalencies and shared blame. This is on the Republicans. More specifically, the Republican House "leadership."



Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Budget Committee chairman and former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and their colleagues may be in a difficult political position. Honestly, we don’t much care. They need to reopen the government and let it pay its bills.

When they've lost the Washington Post editorial board, the Republicans truly have lost the propaganda war. They've lost on policy, they've lost on elections, and they've lost on popular opinion. But that's what this is really all about. They can't win, so they're trying to tear everything down around them. The Republicans aren't just sore losers, they're losers, and they want everyone else to suffer with them.