That was the one word that just kept running through my head as the TV cameras showed the House Judiciary Committee hearing room -- packed with members of Congress -- and an empty chair where Attorney General William Barr was supposed to be. ( Barr announced on Wednesday night that he wouldn't attend the hearing on the Mueller report because he refused to allow staff lawyers to ask him questions about the Mueller report.) That "dumb" whisper became a scream when the cameras caught Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen (D) eating from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a prop he had brought along to show that he believed Barr was -- wait for it -- chicken.

In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

Look, I get it. Part (a lot?) of politics is performance. Politicians do things to get attention -- ideally, for them, the good kind. And that's exactly what Cohen and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-New York, and ranking minority member Doug Collins, R-Georgia -- and, really, Barr himself -- were doing on Thursday. This was pure political performance.

That's not to say there wasn't some underlying point to it all. Nadler wanted the shots of Barr's empty chair to highlight the latest effort by the Trump administration to refuse to acknowledge the constitutionally-mandated oversight role for Congress. Collins wanted to cast Republicans as the victims of deeply unfair treatment at the hands of Nadler and the Democratic majority. Cohen wanted to make some headlines; he had repeatedly referred to Barr as a "chicken" for not appearing -- including in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday. Barr wanted to make sure President Donald Trump knew he wasn't going to cave to House Democrats and their allegedly partisan motivations.

The performance -- from the perspective of that quartet -- went off without a hitch. Everyone got the images they wanted.

But what else was on full display on Thursday -- particularly for the casual observer who might have caught a glimpse of the theater playing out on Capitol Hill -- was how deeply dysfunctional and broken our political system in Washington actually is.

A fake hearing? With chicken props? This is how our elected officials are spending their time? This is who we are sending to represent us?

What happened Thursday morning is simply a confirmation of what lots and lots of people already think about political Washington. In the latest Gallup poll , just 20% of people approved of the job Congress was doing while 77% disapproved. While that's an improvement from the 9% approval for Congress in a November 2013 Gallup poll, it's still really, really bad.

Yes, the bases of both parties will love what happened on Thursday. If you hate Barr (and Trump), you will love the empty chair image -- and Cohen eating fried chicken (even though it was 9 a.m.) If you love Trump, you will applaud Barr's refusal to testify and be gratified by Collins' excoriation of Democrats on the committee for a lack of fairness.

But at this point, does either party need to do any more base service? Is there any doubt that the Trump presidency -- and the Democratic response to it -- has fired up the bases of the two parties beyond anything we've seen in recent years?

At some point -- and it now appears as though that point won't be until after the 2020 election (at the soonest) -- the two parties in Washington will need to find ways to work with one another. Gridlock in Washington has real consequences. Doing nothing and grandstanding about the nothing-doing might feel good (and get you plaudits from your base) but it's not, ultimately, how the government can or should work. Members of Congress were elected to do things, not just act in the latest political drama.

The "hearing" on Thursday morning felt like a step back in the effort to convince the average person that the government not only matters but can function in ways that we expect out of first graders. That might make the Twitterati on both sides happy. But it's inarguably a bad thing for the health of our democracy.