Theodore R. Griffiths
Opinion Editor

A recent article title by David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times perfectly sums up a serious issue in American politics: “Tea party Republicans blame Obama for the shutdown they planned.”
Many people, primarily Fox News viewers, forget that this shutdown has been a talking point for many Republicans, with some taking joy in knowing that this would eventually happen. For instance, in response to the government shutdown in an interview with the Washington Post, Representative Michele Bachmann stated, “It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.”
It is fine for a person to fight for what they believe in, even if it does result in furloughed workers and the shutdown of every monument and national park, but to respond to a government shutdown in the same way that a child will respond to a Playstation 4 this Christmas is utterly irresponsible.
After this show of pride and the apparent will to destroy anything to get her way, she then had the gall to show her face at the World War II Memorial while claiming how shameful it was of President Obama to lock out the veterans attempting to visit it. The obvious ploy for approval was duly noted by Fox News and plastered all over their broadcasting line-up for the rest of that day.
The problem here becomes apparent: a rather large group of Americans only receive their news from Fox News, and it shows a complete lack of integrity to actually report the news, because they would rather provide the viewer with staged photo opportunities of their favorite Republican superheroes.
The misinformation leads to a rather specific group of Americans who can only yell things like “Nazi Germany” and “socialist” in a political argument, because their brains are being diluted by a far more dangerous source than the violent video games that Fox News loves to vilify.

Gretchen Carlson, Fox News personality and professional spokeswoman for politcal ignorance.
Gretchen Carlson, Fox News personality and professional spokeswoman for political ignorance.

It is almost as though an alternative reality exists in this world, and no matter how much I try to educate myself on specific political topics, I somehow always end up being wrong, mainly because there will always be a pundit to tell me that my truth is not the almighty truth, but simply a vague representation of the truth put forth by the “lame-stream media.”
We no longer have a right or wrong, a yes or no, a black or white; It is now only a perpetual grey area that covers all information and not even Gretchen Carlson with her B.A. from Stanford University can sort through it for me, because she has dumbed herself down to a point past any return to sanity. It is a plague called Fox News, and you have been infected if you have ever stayed on that station for more than 5 minutes.
At that point Obama becomes Hitler, Ronald Reagan becomes Jesus, and Bill O’Reilly becomes the registered independent superhero who has fought back all of the liberal bias to conquer the only ultimate truth in this world: conservatism.
I lost all of my readers in those last few paragraphs, so let me get back to my original point: Republicans celebrated this shutdown like their voters in the South celebrate slavery, but now they realize that their idea is not exactly popular with voters, so they have asked Fox News to come to their rescue and tell your grandparents and your one racist uncle that it was all Obama’s fault.
In reality, the Republicans are shutting down the government over a law that passed through both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and was then deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. That law is the incredibly unpopular Affordable Care Act, and when I say “unpopular,” I actually mean “so popular that all the government servers crashed for multiple days while millions of people tried to sign up for it.”
The Republicans have been using the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, as a major talking point for years now, and even though they have voted 42 times to repeal it, no one ever seems to realize the apparent destruction this bill that insures all Americans will cause.
“What destruction will it cause?,” asks the one person still reading this article. Well, I cannot answer that because the Republicans have yet to answer that very question after four years of fighting and eventually shutting down the government.
It is okay that they have yet to answer this question, mainly because they have patriots like Gretchen Carlson employed to make sure your ignorant grandparents revere Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of inequality, and keep fighting against things that they will never understand.