Would this man do something merely to aggrandize himself?

Come on, America: let’s stop all this fighting and fussing. Let’s put aside the disagreements, the system we developed to arbitrate our national will through representatives and votes, and compromise by giving me what I want. When you disagree, you have to compromise eventually. That’s what mature people do. We should definitely compromise in this case, because otherwise I’m going to destroy us all. Our factories will lie ruined atop our schools. Our children will earn pennies a day performing on the internet for the Chinese. The Koch brothers will divide our corpses between them to burn for fuel. Today is Friday, and everything is going to be fine, provided you just compromise. If you don’t, I’m going to murder everybody.

The good news is that Sen. Ted Cruz (R–TX) stopped talking sometime yesterday morning. He gave up his semi-filibuster against a bill that he supported—so much that he could not bear to see it come to the Senate floor, where it might be amended—and now he is asleep. His goals achieved, the House Republicans turned attention to new issues, developing a list of demands that Democrats and the president must meet before they would agree to raise the debt ceiling:

Behind closed doors on Thursday, they laid out their demands for a debt ceiling increase that include the health law delay, fast-track authority to overhaul the tax code, construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, offshore oil and gas production and more permitting of energy exploration on federal lands. The legislation would also roll back regulations on coal ash, block new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gas production, eliminate a $23 billion fund to ensure the orderly dissolution of failed major banks, eliminate mandatory contributions to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, limit medical malpractice lawsuits and increase means testing for Medicare, among other provisions.

If only American politics had thought of this legislative strategy sooner. Think of the missed opportunities! Every time John Boehner shook the president’s hand, he should have demanded a gift certificate to Olive Garden before he would let go.

The Republican Party is not united in extortion, of course. Back when Cruz was planning his unpopular filibuster, party operatives were sending Fox News opposition research to use against him. I apologize for linking to PoliticsUSA, which is maybe 10% better than a chain email, but this story pleases me. We knew Fox News functioned as the propaganda arm of the GOP. But who knew they would turn it so quickly against themselves? At a moment when Republican intransigence seems like an insoluble problem in legislative government, the experienced, unprincipled wing is beginning to make war on the deeply principled idiots.

Meanwhile, in the world to which said idiots have promised to return us, the reporter for Page Six at the New York Post only needs to make her boyfriend another 124 sandwiches before he will marry her. Attempt sent me this article with the note that he wasn’t sure if it was satire, and I can’t tell, either. I can say with certainty that Eric Schulte is batting way above his average, and also the New York Post is a window into a bizarre world whose borders are not entirely contiguous with our own.

There is some overlap, though. On the internet, “make me a sandwich” functions as shorthand for “I am ironically misogynist, except not totally the irony part.” The Tumblr “Make Me a Sandwich, Bitch” tracks people who use that phrase or a variant on Twitter and includes other things they have tweeted. It’s an excellent examination of how performed opposition to political correctness works in society, and also how large a portion of the internet is operated by anime-watching 14 year-olds.

But you’re not going to catch a man that way. You have to learn a skill, like playing a musical instrument:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYKLvYGqaC0

Having watched the video, I see no reason to develop myself or listen to Tool ever again. I’m just too old. It’s too bad those kids don’t need a ride home or oxygen or something, because I could make them compromise and let me drink their blood.

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