Here’s a graphic that’s been showing up at Facebook and elsewhere. It comes from mediamatters.org. Click the thumbnail to enlarge it, and you can read more from Jonathan Chait. Hat tip to Daily Kos for both items.

Journalists who have pretended objectivity in this matter have actually taken a side by giving credence to the rightist Republican rump. It is a faux objectivity to pretend impartiality when none is possible. Headlines such as “Your fault! No shutdown end; Dems, GOP trade blame” and “In shutdown blame game, Democrats and Republicans united: It’s the other side’s fault” enable journalists to strike a pose that proclaims them superior to the conflict and allow them to report on a situation that has deep political and moral significance for our country as though it were a tennis match.

The old-time sports writers were far more honest. They gave both excellence and foolishness their due. I can’t imagine Haywood Hayle Broun writing any of the drivel that passes for reporting on the government shutdown that I have seen in the last few days’ newspapers. But in the final analysis, no matter how much the Republican rump games the system, our government isn’t a tennis match. Tennis matches achieve closure, and the loser doesn’t get to take the winner hostage and demand that she be given enough points to reverse the outcome of play.

At present we are at the beginning of a hostage crisis in this country, just as real as the crisis of the late 1970s when fifty-two Americans were held captive in the U. S. Embassy in Tehran. For the nation’s major news outlets, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and my own St. Louis Post Dispatch, all of which have been great newspapers in their time, to report on this crisis as though it were the result of normal politics and as though our entire government were to blame, is unconscionable. It renders these media conplicit in the crisis over which they pretend superiority.

There are reasons to compare this present crisis to the secessionist crisis that preceded the American Civil War; but I think a better parallel is to be found in the constitutional crisis that signaled the denouement of the first English Civil War of 1642–1651. In 1649 a minority of the long parliament (the rump) was assembled by Oliver Cromwell to try King Charles I for treason. The parliamentary majority were not in favor of the trial; nor were all members of the rump, nor, apparently, were the English people at large—but the deed was done. And the King was beheaded on January 30, 1649.

The core charge against him was that he had sought “out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people of England.” Sound familiar? It should. Today we are witnessing an assertion of right by a parliamentary rump which has cowed the Republican party into refusing to accept the legitimacy of a president who has been twice elected by substantial majorities. This is not business as usual. This is an attempt on the part of a minority of half of the congress to seize power and topple the president.

And the Affordable Care Act is not the cause of the crisis. It is merely the site of it, just as the Monica Lewinsky business was the site of our last Republican impeachment gambit. But it ought to be clear that Republicans do not represent the freedom they so loudly proclaim or the constitution they pretend to defend. The ACA was enacted constitutionally; it has been ratified by a conservative Supreme Court and by the electorate in 2012. It is the Republican parliamentary rump that presently stands outside the constitution, and if polls are to be believed most Americans are wise to that and to who the real tyrants are.

Here’s another graphic, courtesy of Anti-Republican Crusaders. Where will we go from here? The president has invited congressional leaders to a White House conference as the Republican rump continues to foment legislation whose only purpose is to punish him. But things aren’t looking good for the rump. Faced with the anti-democratic consequences of their duplicity, members of the rump now gloat that the government shutdown will teach us all a lesson and contend that the people aren’t always right about what they need. It now looks as though the rump will lose the public relations battle and the support of big business. Not the best resolution, but perhaps it is better than war and bloody decapitation. In the final analysis seventeenth-century England preferred constitutional monarchy to parliamentary tyranny. Monarchy was restored in 1660 and ratified in 1688. Along the way the signers of the king’s death warrant were tried for regicide and followed the king to the scaffold.