This just in from investigative reporter Andy Borowitz:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Just hours after being sworn in at the U.S. Capitol, the freshman class of House Republicans said that they were disappointed that they failed to shut down the government on their first day in office.
“We were all like, ‘O.K., we’re sworn in, let’s shut this thing down,’” said freshman Rep. Byron Ernie (R-Kentucky). “We were all pretty bummed that the government just kept running.”
Rep. Ernie acknowledged that it might have been “overly optimistic” of the freshman Republicans to expect to engineer a government shutdown on their very first day, “but bringing the government to a random standstill was the whole reason we became Republicans,” he said.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) chuckled good-naturedly at the ambitions of the high-spirited G.O.P. freshmen, telling reporters, “I remember what it was like to be young and full of big ideas about crippling our historic institutions for no discernible reason whatsoever. There’s nothing like your first time.”
Read the whole thing.
(Just so there’s no confusion, Borowitz is one of the country’s best satirists. This reads like reality, but it isn’t.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.