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The Year in Political Idiocy

On September 16th, hours after a man had killed a dozen or more people a couple of miles away at the Washington Navy Yard, a middle-aged fellow in shorts and a t-shirt lit a couple of firecrackers and threw them over the White House fence. An eyewitness likened his action, and knowledge of the Secret Service pounding about to come his way, to that of “a quarterback throwing a ball downfield while knowing that he’s about to get hit from his blind side.” This was the most idiotic thing a person did in 2013, and it was amazing.

Idiotic: Not something where a reasonable, well-meaning risk is taken to achieve a concrete goal but ultimately fails. In other words, not something that you sort of “get” or understand. A man throwing firecrackers over the White House fence on a random mid-September day is idiotic enough. There’s no goal there. It’s just throwing firecrackers over the fence of the most highly guarded and paranoid building in the country. It’s going out of your way to be an idiot. And doing it just hours after a mass shooting in Washington D.C., with the entire city on heightened alert? This is the equivalent of a . . . a guy . . . doing something . . . umm . . . I have nothing to compare to this? Maybe a person falling on his or her face from a complete stand-still position, unprompted. You’re standing, then you’re instantly on the ground, in pain, with no outside person or thing to blame. It’s just so avoidable.

The fireworks fella is my North Star when looking back on the past year of political news before it mercifully swirls down the toilet, forever. No one quite reached the magisterial heights of unforced calamity that our dear friend the pyro did. But can’t a politician aspire to such great lowliness?

Former congressman Anthony Weiner ran for mayor of New York City this year, and lost. Why did he lose? Wrong question: Why did he run? As best we can tell, he ran because he wanted to be mayor of New York City for a long time. But there were going to be problems for him this year. As some might recall, he had completely blown up his reputation and standing in American politics in 2011 when he resigned from Congress after sexting with various young women for years. Including, yes, dick pics. Now if he’d put that all behind him when the scandal broke, as he claimed to have, maybe putting his family through the public grinder yet again for a redemptive political campaign would have been a reasonable risk. As the public would soon find out, though, Weiner had in fact continued sexting with many women after the scandal broke, and he finished fifth place in the Democratic primary with 4.9 percent of the vote. Did Weiner think people wouldn’t find out? Was he just re-ruining his political career (for good, this time) for the sheer joy of it? What was the point here?

And what was the point of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) putting his neck on the line by coauthoring a comprehensive immigration bill if he wasn’t going to stick with it? It was laudable of Rubio to stake his reputation among the conservative base on the possibility of achieving a major overhaul of the immigration system. For a minute there, it looked like he might not have been just another talker at all. But there was never any doubt going into it that the conservative base would send a lot of heat his way for supporting a “path to citizenship”—AMNESTY!—in any form whatsoever, or that the bill’s chances of passing the House were slim. When those two exact, predictable things happened, the brave Rubio . . . abandoned his bill completely and spent the rest of the year pandering to the base pathetically on every other issue. He is now a nothing man. Why did he even bother?

Meanwhile Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, some sort of posh hamlet in Canada, smoked crack! There’s nothing wrong with smoking a little crack every now and then. It’s probably fun! But then he lied about it for most of the year, until the inevitable, sobbing confession. He remains in office, but the Toronto city council has stripped him of most of his authority because of the cover-up. He has spent the past few months making (admittedly legendary) jokes about cunnilingus and knocking women over.

**BRIEF INTERMISSION FOR THE WORST TWEET OF THE YEAR**

(SHE GOT FIRED FROM HER FANCY PR JOB.)

Is Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) the worst person in Washington? If you were to ask staffers on Capitol Hill, you’d probably get a resounding yes following his antics this year. A brief recap of David Vitter’s life: he was a smart, promising politician and former Rhodes Scholar, who was then elected to the U.S. Senate and had sex with a bunch of prostitutes. His somehow-still-alive career ever since has been one of PR gimmicks and pandering, and he will never produce a meaningful piece of legislation. He will produce terrible ones, however. He spent most of 2013 trying to ensure that congressional staffers—full-time employees of the federal government—could not receive employee health benefits. He also blocked several other pieces of legislation for the sole purpose of creating ill-will towards himself on the Hill.

Here’s something funny that the Obama administration did this year: it spent several months—years, really—telling everyone to go to a website on October 1, and then everyone went to the website on October 1, and the website didn’t fucking work at all for two months. Don’t really know what else to say about that. Yikes!

The administration also nearly went to war with Syria because the president has been saying the words “red line” over and over for a year or so.

But the most comically avoidable political mishap of the year, which a variety of actors truly went out of their way for extended periods of time to enact, was the shutdown of the federal government.

The worst thing that the Republican party can do is shut down the federal government. It is them living up to their stereotype in all its most glorious ways. They will always be blamed for it, because they will always be the ones who deserve the blame for it. In a year that saw President Obama struggling to get through the news cycle frequently on a day-to-day basis, Republicans decided, No, let’s not avoid colossal unforced errors that could disrupt our goal to retake power at some point in the future. Let’s shut down the federal government until President Obama repeals or defunds his signature piece of legislation that he will use all the powers of his presidency to protect. Let’s do something that will not work at all. Instead of doing anything else, let’s throw firecrackers on the White House lawn hours after a nearby massacre. Let’s fall on our faces from a standing-still position on our own volition. It’s not that it didn’t work. For it to “not work” there would have had to have been some possibility of it “working” to begin with. There was no scenario in which something could have “worked” here. Our children will become dumber for learning about this moment in history books. It was mind-numbing idiocy. Congratulations.