What Is The One Thing That Can End The Shutdown?

This:

A new Fox News poll finds that President Obama's overall job rating has improved 5 percentage points over last month: 45% approve now, up from 40% in September.

The radicals within the GOP are pushing this whole shutdown scheme because they hate government, but they hate Obama more and they won't be able to tolerate watching his approval numbers climb.

The GOP needs to accept the political truth of all this:  Obama isn't in a big hurry to end the shutdown. He can continually lob grenades into the GOP camp and all the GOP can do is feebly try to make the case that the Democrats are responsible for the shutdown, a notion only Fox News appears to be buying into.  The White House knows the longer this shutdown lasts, the better it is for Obama.  As a senior White House official said yesterday: "We are winning...It doesn't really matter to us" how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result."

Although I wouldn't have advised anyone in the Administration to make a comment like that, it does happen to be the truth.  The Democrats are standing strong right now, and the Republicans are beginning to attack each other.  Ted Cruz took a beating last Wednesday during a closed door meeting with fellow GOP senators:

[O]ne GOP senator after another pressed Cruz to offer a proposal to end the shutdown, according to Politico. The junior senator from Texas reportedly had no solution nor could he explain how he would defund the Affordable Care Act – an effort led by Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) that served as the impetus for the current shutdown.

“It was very evident to everyone in the room that Cruz doesn’t have a strategy – he never had a strategy, and could never answer a question about what the end-game was,” an unnamed senator told Politico. “I just wish the 35 House members that have bought the snake oil that was sold could witness what was witnessed today at lunch."

Needless to say, I am enjoying this whole shutdown story quite a bit. I'm sadddened that a lot of people are suffering because of it, but the GOP is going to take a big hit for causing it, which will be a good thing for the country in the long run.

And the absolute best part of all this? The Baggers who caused this mess are not going anywhere. A lot of them are gerrymandered in. Some of these idiots could go out and shoot a hundred people on live TV and they'd still win reelection in their very red-colored districts (they'd argue they were simply exercising their Second Amendment rights when they shot all those people, and their constituents would believe it).

It's as if a self-destruct mechanism was build into the GOP itself. Normally, if a small group of radicals was damaging the brand of a major political party, then the radicals would be purged from the party's ranks. But not in the bizarro world of the GOP -- the radicals are the ones purging the moderates from the party. I think Oregon Congressman Greg Walden said it best about a month ago when he was asked why the GOP was flirting with shutting down the government: “We have to do this because of the Tea Party. If we don’t, these guys are going to get primaried and they are going to lose their primary.”

So there you have it.  The Baggers are here to stay and they will destroy the Republican Party, unless someone can convince the Koch Brothers and other rich conservatives to stop funding them. Let's hope that doesn't happen.