Furloughed federal employee
I realize that sometimes people can be too close to an issue to see exactly how it looks to everyone else, so I thought it’d be interesting to see what the rest of the world thinks about the US Gov’t shutting down as a way of holding their breath till they turn blue protesting the ACA.
Spiegel Online, a German-based site, has some info on how our current debacle is perceived from outside our borders:
“What Washington currently offers up is a spectacle, but one in which the spectators feel more like crying,” writes the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“It’s circumstances like these,” writes Schmitz, “that explain why a brigade of Republicans conduct themselves like a bunch of Berlusconis — as enemies of the state from within who want to cripple the country because that’s the desire of their conservative voters at home.”
When it came to the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, the German press was not pulling any punches. “There are fundamentalists within the world’s largest democracy: The hardline wing of the Republican Party are once more crippling the United States,” writes Nuremberg’s Nachrichten. The Tea Party movement, it concludes, “does not engage in democracy, but in dogmatism.”
“Here are fundamentalists at work who hold up their country to ridicule to advance their pure doctrine,” wrote a commentator in Collogne’sStadt-Anzeiger. “What a tragedy!“
“What has already been apparent in America for a few years now is the self-destruction of one of the world’s oldest democracies. And the great tragedy here is that this work of destruction isn’t being wrought by enemies of democracy, greedy lobbyists or sinister major party donors. America’s democracy is bring broken by the very people who are supposed to be carry and preserve it: the voters, the parties and the politicians.”
“At the moment, Washington is fighting over the budget and nobody knows if the county will still be solvent in three weeks,” the paper concludes. “What is clear, though, is that America is already politically bankrupt.“
If you’d like to read the full article, you can do so right here: Spiegel Online.
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