Can Republican Congresspeople Literally Not Do Math --

-- or at least, not when they're drunk?

"There are not votes in the House to pass a clean CR," John Boehner said today on ABC's This Week. But there are. As far as I know, no Democrat is against such a bill. I'm not just talking about House Democrats. I'm talking about the Democrats in the House, the Senate, the White House, and Democratic Governors and mayors and councilmen and -women and part-time volunteers such as myself. NONE of us, given the chance, would vote against a clean bill and keep the shutdown going. Besides 100% of the House Democrats, 21 House Republicans have said they would vote for a clean bill. Which means, obviously, that my question at the beginning of this post is unfair: around 9% of the House Republicans, 21 of them, can do math well enough to see that the government shutdown is hurting their party tremendously. That leaves around 91% percent of them who can't crunch the numbers well enough to see that the shutdown is causing their already-leaky ship to sink like a stone.

That 91% of Congressional Republicans wouldn't be enough to stop a clean bill on their own. Because the GOP currently occupies more than 50% of the House Seats, however, a little over 0.4% of the House Republicans, a little over 0.2% of the entire House, the Speaker of the House, that boozy, teary faced Cowardly Lion, John Boehner, is not allowing the vote. Many so-called pundits allege that Boehner is not stupid, and that his actions comprise a masterly balancing act between the Tea Party and the realtively-sane parts of the GOP, but maybe we should take him at his word, maybe he's really too dumb to see that all 200 Democrats in the House plus 21 Republicans add up to more than enough to pass a clean bill and end the shutdown just as soon as he decides to hold the vote.

Or maybe I'm just too dumb to see the intricacies of a "masterly balancing act." Yeah, right. Boehner's refusal to get this done looks like nothing but stupidity to me. The Tea Party is done, they're toast. Around 9% of the House Republicans have grasped this and are doing their best to wash the Tea Party stink off of themselves. The longer Boehner waits, the harder it will be for him ever to disassociate himself from them.