According to the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York, an unnamed GOP congressman expressed surprise at the government shutdown. “To be honest with you, I did not think we’d be in a government shutdown situation,” he said. He blamed “the Cruz phenomenon” for “disrupting” the plans of House Republicans, likening the current GOP situation to the Battle of Gettysburg:

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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. 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.

In the unnamed congressman’s analogy, the Republicans are the Confederate units stumbling into the Union cavalry.

Later in the same interview, he again aligned the GOP with the Confederacy, saying “[w]e’re not in a situation that has been planned out and war-gamed and plotted, OK? We stumbled into a situation like Gettysburg that nobody planned, and all of a sudden each side is feeding more troops into it, and it’s turning into a much bigger deal.”

It isn’t news that Republicans didn’t “war-game” the shutdown, but that an unnamed congressman is already discussing the shutdown in language that evokes the beautiful losers of the noble Southern cause may indicate that the GOP knows how this will end, even if they haven’t got it “plotted” out.

[Image via AFP]