Medicaid, -$600 Billion; Education, -$5.2 Billion. Tax Benefits for Billionaires. It's Petty Meanness and Cruelty Disguised as a Budget.

The Democratic Party must have nothing to do with it.

So I understand there’s a government shutdown.

It’s kind of a pleasant break from the government we have, with the troops making war in peaceful cities, thugs in masks roughing up people who don’t look like Americans, and the Defense Department declaring war on portly generals who refuse to shave.

But, oh yes, a government shutdown.

Now I don’t fly a lot and I don’t have a government job, so I’ll enjoy this break from the majority idiocy for a while, but I also know that the effects will spread further by the day. We’ll all be affected, and I blame the Democrats—for giving in on the first God-awful proposal last March. Blame Chuck Schumer if it makes you feel better, but he had plenty of collaborators in his party who felt that, if they didn’t pass it, the Trump administration would make additional spending cuts. Don’t look now...oh, okay, look here.

Then hark back for a pleasant moment to 2020 when this soon-to-be felon and obvious insurrectionist faced impeachment (and more) from his little January 6 experiment in criminal mayhem. Mitch McConnell and his ilk caved, of course, but save a special dark spot in your heart for Susan Collins, who said the president had learned a "pretty big lesson" from impeachment. In a February 4 interview, she dwelled on Trump’s foreign policy as if there had never been an insurrection in which Americans protecting the Constitution had been killed. If Schumer’s March acceptance was stupid, then we need a new adjective for Collins’ belief in a chastened Trump.

I bring her up now because I know there are Democrats who want to be a Collins and “make nice—pass the budget so that people won’t suffer. They will suffer, and if you want to know which Americans will suffer, do one of two things: read the list of programs being cut, or look in the mirror.

There is no appeasing Donald Trump. And all his myrmidons, flunkeys, sycophants, and stooges are so frightened and cowed that they are past the point of making rational decisions for you and me. But somebody has to, and while I have very little remaining confidence in the courage of my Democratic party, if they can dredge up a modicum of audacity and honor and hold fast, at the very least it will show some backbone and provide a pleasant contrast to the current MAGA puppets and underlings.