Quote of the day: you don't deserve praise for barely doing your job just because you barely did it edition.

Quoted for truth:

Imagine a restaurant, Chez Polis, in which the chef and the manager are bitter rivals. One evening they bicker and almost come to blows over a meal. Their one patron is about to walk out but moments before he does, they declare a truce and deliver the smallest of three courses. They put the plate on the table and immediately start patting themselves on the back. This seems strange to the patron, who thought delivering a starter course was a restaurant's basic task.

-John Dickerson, "What's the Big Deal?"
Slate, April 9^th, 2011

I mean, look, I'm happy that a Federal shutdown (and all the havoc it would have wreaked) has been avoided. Everybody ought to be for reasons that would be obvious to any adult in possession of more than a grizzled, unused stump over his brainstem. But I sure as hell won't be giving anybody any credit to Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the President for brokering a deal--that's their fucking job, has been their fucking job for more than two hundred years, and the fact that they've recently been performing that part of the job so clumsily and with such sound and fury (signifying nothing, the sounds of idiots, to paraphrase the man) is a bit of a national embarrassment.

Or: another metaphor that comes to mind is that you're on a bus and realize too late to get off that the driver is drunk and possibly high, and he proceeds to put the peddle to the floor and run the next five stoplights, only averting killing and injuring all of his passengers through a deft and mostly lucky series of accidentally-executed bootlegger's maneuvers climaxing in a brilliantly and fortuitously-performed powerslide down at the docks that leaves the bus' rear tires dangling precipitously off the end of a pier so that the vomiting and gasping passengers may delicately stagger off the bus to collapse in relief and gratitude that they only almost died, thank the gods, praise Jesus, Allahu Akbar, ♥ the laws of physics and then the driver pushes his puffy red mug through the door gates and slurs, "Well aren't'cher people gonna thank me?"

Like hell. You, sir, are a terrible bus driver.