It was all about the shoes.

It was all about the shoes.

The congressman began with an anecdote from the Civil War. "I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn't intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it," the congressman said. "That's basically what's happening now in a political sense. This isn't exactly the fight I think Republicans wanted to have, certainly that the leadership wanted to have, but it's the fight that's here."

A Republican congressman gives his version of history to explain how the Republican leadership blundered into a government shutdown.Shoes??!!!??? "Oh, don't mind us, we're just invading this bit of Pennsylvania, trying to get to Philadelphia, because that's where the shoes are. Sorry for all the dead people along the way."

And of course, the GOP is the Confederate army in this mis-historical analogy. This anonymous congressman is proving that tea party Republicans have about as firm a grasp on history as they do economics. And they're controlling John Boehner. With these people leading the House, can the nation long endure?

Join Daily Kos and the DCCC to tell John Boehner: End this shutdown now.